The Globe announced today that it would put of a partial "pay wall" and the tweets are flying.
From the Phoenix, whick predicts the move will be the end of Boston.com and that won't be a good thing.
It's easy to take Boston.com for granted, but take it from someone who's spent a lot of time analyzing what works and what doesn't in online news: Boston.com is the single-best city-dot-com site in the country (but probably will not be after the paywall -- more thoughts on that in a second). There are better newspaper sites -- such as the NYTimes.com. And there are smarter social-news-and-aggregator sites, like this one whose name Beard will not speak, not to mention the one he's leaving Boston.com to work for.
But Boston.com was something else, a hybrid of sorts. It got in early enough to grab the city-dot-com real estate, and then never lost sight of the online/community mission that sprung up around the journalism the Globe was creating. It's easy to slough off the cat-picture galleries and the mom blogs if you think of Boston.com as merely the Globe's home. But Boston.com has been more than that for quite some time.
No comments:
Post a Comment