A publisher from Iceland is starting a free newspaper in Boston with a heavy dose of user-generated content. Writers can sign up for blogs, photographers can sign up on a designated photo-sharing service, people who shoot video will be invited to contribute, too. If it follows the plans being discussed so far, all this will bubble up from the cyber world and the editors of the print publication will harvest the best stuff each day for the fiber product. A Google news search turns up nothing, but a blog search turns up many postings. For example, the top managers are running a blogspot blog about the project, where this post says (in part): "BostonNOW wants to encourage active participation in our online and print community, so interested contributors will only need to follow a few steps to be considered for the print publication. As soon as the BostonNOW website (bostonnow.com) goes live (scheduled for Monday, April 16; the day before our first paper is published), you would create a BostonNOW account."
Are they testing a new Nokia camera phone? This post shows the view from the BostonNow office.
Steve Garfield at Off On A Tangent blogs about a meetup: "I went to a meeting tonight about the new free paper that's launching in Boston soon called BostonNow. In this picture, Editor-in-Chief John Wilpers is talking to bloggers about how they can contribute to the paper. We had a far ranging discussion with lots of ideas shared from everyone."
Newspaper Innovation has some details: "The paper is financed by Icelandic media company Dagsbrun. Russel Pergament, former publisher of the Boston Metro and Am New York is running the operation. He is also CEO of the American branch of Dagsbrun, called 365 Media USA, which has plans for free dailies in other US cities as well. Chief editor is John Wilpers (Washington Examiner, Boston Globe, the Boston Herald and Boston Metro). Wilpers to PBS: “I was the editor that took it [Boston Metro] from about 150,000 readers to 500,000″."