Thoughts on Boston Now
I dropped into the Boston Now "blogger summit" last Saturday to hear what "Group Editor" John Wilpers had to say about Boston's latest would-be free daily. I left shortly after his presentation still not knowing exactly what he had called us all together for.
Wilpers, former Boston Metro editor and founding editor of the Washington Examiner, has a good deal of experience with free dailies. Boston Metro's circulation doubled under his leadership. Bringing his experience back to Boston, this latest venture has a good chance of turning out to be a formidable player in the local market. And Wilpers' participation is key.
The funding comes from Iceland, and he claims there's no particular editorial slant (the Examiner is staunchly conservative). He was very candid about the motive, from the investors' standpoint: making money. Contentwise, the newspaper, like Metro, will get most of its stories off the wire and retain only a couple of reporters and staff writers. The remaining content will come from that series of tubes, the internets. Specifically bloggers and something Wilpers is calling "C-Js" or citizen-journalists, who will not necessarily be paid for their contributions (although Boston Now is working on a "compensation plan").
So as it stands right now, what's in it for bloggers? Wilpers is betting they'll be happy with the exposure, and he (somewhat cynically) held out the pie-in-the-sky possibility of that exposure leading to fame, fortune, even "superstar" (his word) status for some lucky blogger down the line. That seemed a pretty hard-sell to me, personally, but then I'm already a superstar, and I know it's not all it's cracked up to be. Although on the plus side, you do get a lot more blowjobs.
While bloggers who think contributing to a free daily in the hopes of making it big (I was already way big before I started blogging) will be in for a rude awakening, Wilpers is in for his own. He'll find out soon enough that quality content is pretty scarce in the so-called blogosphere, and that he will eventually have to do a little more for writers who can consistently provide it.
If he needed proof negative all he had to do was look around our table. No more than forty people total had shown up for the "summit." It may have been more like twenty (at least four members of the press had come to cover the gathering—WBUR was on the scene—and there was a bored-looking DJ, a bartender, and a couple of people who'd wandered in looking for lunch)—of the ten at my table with Wilpers only three were actual bloggers. That is, with actual, active blogs.
The two other guys with active blogs were the fantastically prolific Jason Feifer, who is also cute as a button and extremely well-behaved, and has been blogging at his very appropriately named happyscrappy forever. And a rather odd, nervous, shifty-eyed fellow who writes Jay's Movie Blog and the rather more, erm, interesting transplanted life, described thusly in the sidebar of said site:
In July of 2003, nanomachines were introduced into the brains of Martin Hartle and Michelle Garber and activated, exchanging the contents of those minds. It's happened at least four other times, but that one produced me - Martina Hart, thirty years of male experience in the body of a woman in her mid-twenties (and a killer figure, if I do say so myself). As you might imagine, my life has been crazy ever since.I bet.
One woman at my table had a social justice style blog dedicated to sexual harassment, which had one post in December, six in January, four in February, and has had one post so far in March.
The others did not claim to blog but were "intrigued"—I had no idea how popular a word this was—by Wilpers' idea (whatever it was), and a couple of them fawned incessantly—"It just seems like somebody should have thought of this long ago," said one. "It's just so intriguing," said the other.
Wilpers took it all in stride. I can't imagine that he was anything but underwhelmed by the showing. There are a couple of myths about blogging and bloggers that this gathering exposed. One is that there is something called the blogosphere. When old media use this term they are talking about a handful of sites dedicated to politics, like The Huffington Post and Daily Kos. They aren't thinking so much of happyscrappy or the few blogs like it, not overtly political or news-based, dedicated more or less to the minutiae and miscellany of everyday life, that provide some consistent content, much less those that provide consistent quality content (and I certainly do not claim to be among them).
The blogosphere, as far as the traditional print and broadcast media are concerned, is a land of would-be journalists, cranks and hacks, who mainly provide knee-jerk reactions to what the traditional media spew out. Where Wilpers sees a brigade of citizen-journalists marching to the beat of political justice, and providing a free and ready source of daily content, I see a lot of idiosyncratic voices, some more articulate than others, some whispering, some mumbling, some shouting obscenities at passing cars, some making farting noises with their armpits while belching their ABCs, and so on. That's the Other Blogosphere. The one we live in.
And that'll be the crux of Mr. Wilpers conundrum somewhere not too far down the road, methinks.
There were other issues from a writer's perspective, too. All writers who have ever dealt with editors, particularly newspaper editors, know that no more vile creature than the newspaper editor exists in the known universe, from a writer's perspective. Which is why there are none in the blogosphere.
The trouble is, as vile as editors are, it turns out they're a necessary evil, especially for newspapers. Wilpers seems to want to tap into the rebel spirit of blogging, but hinted that Boston Now would not be willing to feature or link to blogs that used "obscenity," however defined, or, more bewilderingly, were "biased." Which pretty much rules out all the blogs that are, um, blogs.
Which is why, as I said, I was left sort of scratching my head.
Thanks for the report, sorry I missed you! Was going to go (was even going to bring our blogger-in-training), but when you come down with your 900th cold of the season, you gotta just stretch out on the couch and doze through several hours of Saturday-morning cartoons instead.
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I was looking for you, Adam.
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I was there, and hoping to see you, too, Adam. My cold arrived shortly after I attended the Blogger Summit. I agree with a lot of Mike's comments but I am not as pessimistic as he is. Knowing Russel (the publisher of Boston Now) and having worked for him, I am sure he will make it work out, by hook or by crook!
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I just had an image of a guided tour of a mining town... "Look at the great company store, all you have to do is work for free! I know you love to write, wouldn't it be great to squeeze all the passion out of it by forcing you to do it daily whether you have content or not? Look around this town, if you work hard, one day all of this will be yours."
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I received an email about the event, but when I looked at the blog, I was not very impressed. I think it was just a blogspot blog. I was expecting at least wordpress or typepad. That would have given me a sense that either they had $50 to put together for a blog or some time to build a wordpress blog.
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Mike:
Rats! I hate being outted. I was hoping to hide my "vile" editor side a little longer.
Believe it or not, I actually enjoyed your blog, even the digs, and some of your creative descriptions of our event and the attendees. And at least you had the guts to say what you think publicly and give me the opportunity to respond.
I, too, scratch my head, wondering how we’ll solve the very problems you raised: Will we be able to find enough high quality bloggers posting with a degree of regularity? How do we deal with bias? How do we create a fair, respectable compensation system?
Suffice to say, though, that I believe we’ll solve those problems.
1. We WILL publish blogs without judging their bias
2. We WILL solicit blogger participation in all our decisions
3. We WILL pay bloggers based on a system we build together
If, as you say, there aren’t enough quality bloggers in Boston (and I’m not sure I agree with you there), the opportunity to be published and promoted in 135,000 papers a day and to get paid will go a long way toward building a market for quality.
Either I misspoke or you misunderstood me on the question of publishing bloggers with a bias. It’s not a question of “if,” but of “how.” We may solve that challenge graphically or by position or even using color. But we WILL publish bloggers with attitude.
We will be paying bloggers after we figure out, with the bloggers’ input, what kind of compensation system works for everyone.
I apologize if I left you dazed or confused about our mission (might you also have been feeling the effects of one of the rewards you said you enjoy from your superstar status?). I’d love to have you come to our next meeting where I plan to talk less and listen more. We want people like you to tell us what we need to do to involve the community in the newspaper.
Thanks for the opportunity to clear things up. – John W.
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Mike, is john saying they have a free print paper similar to the metro, that the blogger stories will appear in? If so that is a whole different kettle of fish.
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The way John explained it, there will be AP content and alongside it there will be blogger content. This will be trickier than it seems when you consider the turnover time for a daily. And as he says here he has not quite worked out the layout, either.
The way John described the presentation of blogger content is that there would be a sort of "abstract" of the blogger's post--an excerpt--in the paper, and readers will have to go to the website to get the rest. Boston Now's website may not contain the whole post, either. I was not clear about this--in any case, they will link to the blog the content was taken from.
If you are interested in learning more, or giving feedback, you should go to the next meeting. Alternatively, email John himself. He is definitely into engaging with folks who are interested in the idea.
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Nice work Mike. Your assessment is right on in my opinion. Good to meet you last weekend. Hope to cross paths again soon...
- the woman at your table with the social justice style blog
(By the way, since we're dependent on the harassers for posts at HollaBackBoston, check out www.hollabacktalk.blogspot.com where we are slightly more prolific.)
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I've been working in the newspaper industry for only 8 or so years but it's clear there is need for a change and there is need for the people to have a part of it. I mean, how many times have you watched the news and seen it spun to a particular audience? Using BostonNOW's ideas we can present opposing points of view from the community itself, rather than the current "Media Giant A's angle vs. Media Giant B's angle" model.
Either way things need to change in Boston. Every day the Herald is filled with trash and ads, and the Globe is 3000 pages of Old Man Bathroom Run filler. When we watch the news and say, "Oh, what a load of crap," the average joe that is fooled by media spin never hears us. Boston Now will give people that opportunity, and I think it is one that a lot of people will be eager to take part in once the fire starts.
At the risk of sounding confrontational, I'd like to point out that the newspaper and publication industry is obviously in need of change and modernization, desperately so. Newspaper profit margins and circulation is in the toilet and rapidly swirling around into eventual oblivion; things need to change, plain and simple.
The only problem with that is nobody's doing it. Nobody's even trying. Everywhere papers are just cutting corners further and further. Eventually you're going to run out of corners, regardless.
I guess my point is, I'm a little confused as to why you seem so bothered by this development. You can easily participate in Boston Now and try to influence and help the process or you can stand idly by on the soap box while it either lives or dies without your work involved. It seems to me that something like Boston Now is to your benefit regardless.
You spoke about the 'possibility of compensation' in your remarks and that bit really confused me. "Possibility of compensation" certainly seems to be a better bet than "indefinite lack of compensation." It's also worth noting that you are thinking strictly of blogs in this "blogosphere" world. Perhaps John and his people are thinking within the same limited scope. However, there are literally thousands of people in the target age brackets who have opinions and thoughts and reactions that they post every day. Maybe it's on their myspace blog, or maybe it's on their livejournals, or maybe it's on their blogspot site...but it's out there. And aside from their friends list, nobody ever sees those things. Here now is an opportunity for these people to make themselves known--a rare chance for new up-and-comers to become published writers and help ascend the ranks of the industry, or an opportunity for bloggers like yourself to jump onboard a more consistent medium for your work.
I don't know. Perhaps its because I have actually worked under the hell of the newspaper biz for the last eight years, but I see this as nothing but a golden opportunity. Times need to change, and despite any naysaying, at least Wilpers and Pergament are willing to take that gamble.
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