The Networked Journalism Summit brings together the best practices and practitioners in collaborative, pro-am journalism. It's about action: next steps, new projects, new partnerships, new experiments.
Participants:
Dan Pacheco, Northwest Voice, John Wilpers, Boston Now; Jarah Euston, Fresno Famous; Dan Barkin, Raleigh News and Observer
Moderator: David Cohn
The panelists talked of their development of user-generated content on the local level, involving those who Barkin called “people formerly known as the audience.”
Introduction and Narrative: BostonNOW, a free metro paper, launched in April of 2007 after Russell Pergament, most recently from AM New York, hooked up with Dagsbrun, an Icelandic media company, for financial backing. John Wilpers, former editor of the Washington Examiner, was brought on board to help shape the emerging free metro as its editor.
Wilpers had the idea of running excerpts from local Boston blogs on both the website and in the actual print newspaper at a Media Giraffe conference. Slowly Wilpers began to introduce himself to local bloggers in Boston and eventually organized two open meetings. The first gathering was somewhat confrontational, filled with critical and suspicious questions: “Will you edit us? Will you pay us?” etc., but by the second meeting bloggers brought constructive ideas and began to give suggestions for the young paper, says Wilpers.
BostonNOW has become the first US print paper to run content from local bloggers, making the paper “fun, intriguing and reflective of the Boston community,” says Wilpers. The first blog post appeared in the paper May 1st, a few weeks after the initial launch. Since then BostonNOW has registered over 500 Boston bloggers to appear on their website and their paper.
Main Goal of BostonNOW: The goal of the company, as a free daily newspaper, is to grab a healthy market share of readers. BostonNOW, like other free metro papers, serves the market of people that want to consume the important news of the day, but can only spare 20 minutes during their daily commute.
But BostonNOW is also a laboratory to test how a community can be involved in the creation of a print product. That includes everything from the articles that the paper runs to the daily news meetings, which BostonNOW webcasts. “If we don’t involve the community in the direction of the paper, print journalism will become less and less relevant,” says Wilpers.
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