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Friday, April 20, 2007

New free Boston daily written by bloggers

Jason sez, "This week, Boston Now, a new free daily newspaper launched in Boston to compete with the Metro. The paper is called Boston Now and will rely heavily on bloggers and user-submitted photos for content, with very limited content from the wire services and traditional full-time journalists."

In the name of relevancy, BostonNOW is handing huge swaths of its editorial pages to its readers. Instead of bemoaning competition from bloggers, they're proposing a true pro-am partnership, promising to publish the work of any blogger who's willing and literate enough to work with them.

Link

Update: Jon sez, "They ripped off content from Bostonist.com - while they gave the URL we certainly didn't give them permission to put the clips into print. BostonNOW is still in their inagural week and there has been little to no blogger contributed content thus far. From what's been reported to me the system they'd announced for "submitting" content wasn't even fully functional by press time of the first issue (and possibly later than that). I really want to like a print paper that is looking to use content from willing bloggers - but yesterday they straight lifted content from bostonist.com without permission."

Update 2: Overheard at a Party sez, "I overheard Sean Bonner from Metroblogging respond to this news at the Web2Expo earlier this week. His quote was 'Print versions of blogs - their slogan should be 'Bringing you yesterday's news tomorrow".'"

Update 3: BostonNOW's John Wilpers sez,

Let me apologize for our unauthorized lifting of copy from bostonist. I am embarrassed and chagrined. I did not authorize or clear it, nor was I even aware of it. I will certainly find out how it happened and make sure it never happens again. That (unauthorized lifting) is definitely NOT our model. We hadn't planned on doing that and we don't plan on doing that in the future...
And we hope we can give aspiring writers, reporters, photographers, videographers, etc. the kind of exposure that can help jump-start their careers. And, ultimately, we hope to develop a compensation system to reward them for their work with something beyond fame and massive exposure, and to offer consultation on optimizing their own sites for making money (if that's their interest).
Based on that philosophy, unauthorized lifting of content is antithetical and will not happen again. At the risk of over-doing it, I apologize again for this instance.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:38:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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