BostonNOW is a new free daily launching in a few weeks. The paper will compete with the Metro as a mass-circulation paper on the streets and on the T.

While this is an interesting development in the stuff-you-can-do-instead-of-interacting-
with-others-in-public department, it is more interesting in that you will actually have an opportunity to interact with more of the public because of this paper. And no, I don’t just mean that there will now be another person trying to hand you a newspaper as you get on the subway…

According to their blog (which, until the above site goes live on 4/16/07, is the official way to interact with the staff):

Your ideas about the Boston community (news, politics, sports, the arts, etc.) will appear side-by-side with the words of BostonNOW staffers and wire service journalists.

That means that this newspaper wants you to contribute your writing, your photos, and your videos for distribution to 150,000 print readers and a (hopefully) large web audience. They are going after area bloggers for content right now, but for me, the most interesting thing about this experiment is that anyone can contribute. Just sign up on their site, and you can submit news, commentary, reviews, or even rants. The best submissions will be included in the paper, and – if you are a consistently good contributer – they will pay you for your work.

Unlike many news outlets that encourage community contribution, BostonNOW won’t vacuum up all of this content into its intellectual property vault:

If you post to BostonNOW, you still own your content. BostonNOW will not take ownership of your blogs, stories, photos, or videos, nor will it require exclusivity.

All of these things make for a pretty appealing concept; I know that I’ll be contributing at least once in a while.

Of course, it remains to be seen if this idea will work. They have a solid core idea, they have funding (the guy who started the Metro in Boston and AM New York in the Big Apple got a pile of cash from an Icelandic media conglomerate to set papers like this up all over the country), and they have an audience of Bostonians who are bored with the truncated wire-service stories the Metro tries to pass off as news. Though I’m sure it will be slow at first, they should have a decent number of contributers. Submission quality will be an issue, as will the details of a new media/old media hybrid.

I’ve been to two “Bloggers’ Summit” meetings organized by BostonNOW. At both, the attendees seemed skeptically enthusiastic. I haven’t read many of their blogs, but there were enough people there to flesh out a paper if all of the content they produce is good at least some of the time (a dubious assumption, I know). The leadership of the paper seemed a bit sketchy on some of the details, and had some surprising holes in their plan, but they are open to ideas and seem ready to change anything that doesn’t work.

So I guess it is wait-and-see, but I’m optimistic. I think this is a good idea, and I really hope they can pull it off.

This picture is a detail of one of their layout mockup. The website and the physical paper will look basically the same. I liked this particular section because the standard filler-text deadline could actually be a Sports Section story…