Tuesday, May 15, 2007

BostonNOW.com ready for blogging

The BostonNOW.com website is up and ready for blogging! Check out Editor-in-Chief John Wilpers's welcome post to the community.

Please visit BostonNOW.com and click on the BlogNOW tab to register for your own BostonNOW.com account and blog. Using our customized WordPressMU interface, you will be able to post original items directly to BostonNOW, or post existing items from your own blogs.

We look forward to seeing your blogs on BostonNOW.com!

Sincerely,
The BostonNOW Editorial Team

Monday, April 30, 2007

Send us a link to your blog

We are having a few last-minute (OK, they're later than last-minute...) bugs with our blogging functionality on BostonNOW.com, so we're going to go to a stop-gap measure for a day or two because we don't want to wait any longer to publish Boston bloggers in the paper.

So, here's what we're proposing — If you'd like your blog to be considered for publication in the paper, e-mail us at media@bostonnow.com with your name and the URL of the item you'd like spotlighted. If chosen, your blog (writing, photography, videography) will be excerpted in BostonNOW's print publication with a link back to your site.

After the blogging functionality is up (later this week), we'll start the system of having you post on BostonNow.com, but for now we'll simply point off.

We look forward to seeing your submissions.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

We're so close to launching the blogging functionality

Thank you all for your patience.

It's been frustrating for us to have launched the BostonNOW without being able to get bloggers into the first editions, but we wanted to make sure we had the blogging functionality right.

We knew we had to get our content online the day we launched, so we focused on finishing the content part of the site and kept working on the blogging side of things.

But now we're ready to test the blogging functions tomorrow in hopes of launching the blogs on Friday. By Sunday then, we hope that a bunch of you will have posted and we can put you in the Monday paper.

In the meantime, we hope people have enjoyed being able to watch and participate in our news meeting (clicking on the NewsroomNOW tab at the top of our home page will take you to the meeting room for the 1 p.m. event every day, Sunday through Thursday).

I look forward to reading your stuff starting, we hope, on Friday.

John

John Wilpers
Editor-in-chief

Friday, April 20, 2007

Apologies to bostonist

In our rush to get some items in the paper and get the paper to the press Thursday night, one of our editors lifted some content from bostonist.com without authorization from the folks at bostonist. We attributed it, giving the web address of the item, but we did not seek permission in advance.

Following a post about BostonNOW by Cory Doctorow on boingboing.net, Jon Petitt of bostonist noted the unauthorized lifting of content. I have e-mailed the following note to both Jon and Cory. We apologized and assured them it would not happen again.


Jon:

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.

Our vision is based entirely on contributors coming to our site and posting, not us going out on the Internet and poaching.

Our model is to attract Boston-area bloggers to the BostonNOW.com website to become part of a community and to have the opportunity to be published in a metropolitan daily newspaper with 150,000 circulation and a readership of between 300,000 and 400,000 people. We hope people want to share their stories, ideas, arguments, photos, videos, podcasts, etc. with hundreds of thousands of other Bostonians.

We hope we can give aspiring writers, reporters, photographers, videographers, etc. the kind of exposure that can help jump-start their careers. Ultimately, we hope to develop a compensation system to reward them for their work with something beyond fame and massive exposure.

This incident will not happen again, and, at the risk of over-doing it, I apologize once more for this instance.

If you think it's appropriate, please forward my apologies to other members of the bostonist staff and management.

Sincerely,

John

John Wilpers
Editor-in-chief
365 Media USA
BostonNOW
30 Winter St.
Boston, MA 02108-4720

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Aaaargh, we lost conectivity for the news meeting

Darn.

Just when our news meeting was going strong with attendees giving us some great ideas about how Boston-area colleges treat security in light of the Virginia shooting, we lost Internet connectivity. Whoosh.

We've regained our connection, but we have to go back to putting out the paper, so we'll just have to meet again tomorrow at 1 p.m. (the poll asking attendees if they preferred the 1 p.m. time to yesterday's 10:30 a.m. time was a runaway win for 1 p.m.).

See you tomorrow. Sorry about the glitch.

John Wilpers
Editor-in-chief