Saturday, April 14, 2007

Getting close to launch

Things are pretty frenetic here as we count down the hours to our Monday, April 16 website launch and Tuesday, April 17 newspaper launch.

We can’t wait. (Well, that’s not entirely true, as we wouldn’t mind having an extra day or two to tighten things up a bit.) Building a website and newspaper from scratch in less than two months is, to put it mildly, a real stretch. Our Web Content Master, Regina O’Brien, and our developer, David Sawyer of Metaface Development, are building a site you’ll really, really enjoy.

There were a couple of problems that looked daunting at first: how to find and then encourage a lot of top-quality Boston-area bloggers to participate, and, second: how to webcast our news meeting so people could see and hear and interact with us.

We hope we’ve begun to solve the first challenge. Over the last two months, we’ve been checking out hundreds of Boston-area blogs. We found a lot that impress us, and we’ve reached out to a lot of folks and had a lot of people come to us looking to be included in the paper and on the website.

We’re sending e-mail invitations to as many Boston-area bloggers as we can over the weekend. We’re inviting them and all other Boston bloggers to post on BostonNOW.com on Monday (sometime after noon) to be able to get into the inaugural edition of the paper coming out on Tuesday.

Instructions for posting and being considered for publication are discussed in earlier posts on this blog.

On the second challenge, we think we’ve solved the news meeting webcast challenge. Most remote video cameras don’t include sound, so we had to find a solution and Adobe ConnectPro seems to be the ticket.

Every morning at 10am, up to 60 readers will be able to get a virtual seat at the table when we discuss the direction of the paper: what we should write about in the next day’s paper and in the near future.

Seats in ConnectPro’s virtual auditorium are assigned on a first-come, first-served basis and are limited to 60 (at this point). So, go to BostonNOW.com starting at about 9:55am each day. Click on the tab “NewsroomNOW” at the top of the page and follow the instructions to be taken to the “Green Room,” where you will find the meeting's agenda, a poll, and instructions on how to participate.

If you get shut out, we’ll be notified and we’ll look into adding more seats. You can still catch the meeting, though, as we’ll be recording the meeting and archiving the last five sessions. So, you can watch it at your convenience and send us a e-mail with your thoughts.

That’s the latest from the BostonNOW aerie at 30 Winter Street in Downtown Crossing as we brace for both our launch and what (hyperbolic?) meteorologists are predicting will be another “Storm of the Century!”

I look forward to seeing your stuff on BostonNOW.com.

John Wilpers
Editor-in-chief
BostonNOW

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Where are you, BostonNow? Flooding problems? Will the meeting take place at 10am? We're watching and waiting.

Anonymous said...

Who are these guys that they think they can just come to Boston and take over the whole indy content scene? I don't need BostonYesterday's old media paradigm to sanction my writing, and I definitely don't need their money-- the token amounts they're indicating for pasting your work on their stupid subway freesheet aren't worth the time it would take to deal with their boring website anyhow. My only question is, is BostonYesterday gonna hire crackheads to harass commuters at State Street too?

Anonymous said...

This is a newspaper, right? You guys are familiar with the idea of deadlines, right? Way to hit your deadlines, BostonYesterday. Good work.

Anonymous said...

I think it would be worth it to police content. People don't really want to hear from ANYbody. They want to hear what the most interesting anybodies have to say about important local issues. I found the "meeting" I heard quite useless. I don't want "best useless sites" in the universe dug up and brought to my attention. I can find plenty of those on my own.