BostonNOW, a free Boston daily newspaper, is incorporating blogs and other citizen media big time, it seems. (Rich media is the buzzword of the hour, after all.) While I’m not really familiar with neither Boston nor the newspaper, what Editor-in-Chief John Wilpers says about the changes seems to make an awful lot of sense:
All my traditional newspaper friends tell me I’m crazy — or they’re holding their fire, waiting, I think, to see what happens before committing themselves. But they, too, are probably thinking, “What newspaper in its right mind would publish bloggers in the paper?†Well, the way I see it, we’re inviting the readers into the paper to make it more relevant, more fun, more intriguing, more curious, and more reflective of our community. Think about it — the traditional daily newspaper is run by a small group of mostly males who are mostly white and mostly older and mostly living outside the city (by way of full disclosure, I fall into each of those categories, sadly on some of those counts). So I think it would be a blast of fresh air to include in the paper the thoughts and writing and photography and videography of lots of different people from all around Boston.
