BLOGGING, PUKING AND CRYING

By DIG STAFF

del.ico.us | digg it! | reddit!

print | email | 4 Comments

JOHN WILPERS'S REIGN of bloggy terror as editor of BostonNOW has ended. Last week, the paper abruptly replaced Wilpers with a two-headed managing-editor monster; it also announced that Wilpers would continue to consult with the paper on internet strategy and company expansion.

We can't imagine that this (the firing and the oft-dreadful paper) is how Wilpers envisioned things would turn out. When he spoke to the Dig this past spring, Wilpers was brimming with optimism and with ideas on how to save journalism.

"If it works, and I really believe it will, we do have the chance to change the way that newspapers do business," Wilpers said. "This inexorable circulation slide you're seeing is brutal, and it's discouraging. It has a lot to do with newspapers' irrelevancy to people's lives. This paper is going to be relevant ...The old model is too exclusive. It doesn't represent the community. There's no content that's relevant to many readers. They still think with that gatekeeper model for what belongs and what doesn't. We don't agree. We're opening up the floodgates. Look out!"

Look out indeed. The shit of it is, Media Farm agrees, more or less, with Wilpers's critique of the industry we both work in. Saying newspapers today are stodgy, boring and depressingly irrelevant is generally being kind. We agree that newspapers have to embrace - rather than run in urine-soaked terror from - the internet, as well as citizen journalism and user-generated content.

The question is whether BostonNOW under Wilpers failed to properly execute a spot-on vision, or whether the model he helped dream up is itself broken. We're leaning toward the latter.

Blogging, by nature, thrives on immediacy and on viral potential. By slapping the ledes from blog entries onto newsprint and haphazardly placing them alongside short wire pieces, BostonNOW is taking the form and shaking it like a noisy baby. It doesn't work journalistically, and it doesn't work from a reader's perspective. Plus, when you've got no real way of cultivating and rewarding talented writers while suppressing dreck, dreck is what you get.

Of course, BostonNOW's failures extend far beyond Wilpers. The entire venture came together far too quickly. It was clumsy and amateurish. The paper seemed to suffer greatly from launching without a website to upload user content onto. The decision to launch without a copyeditor was suicide and resulted in a number of rather extreme assaults upon the English language. Seriously. It felt like we were reading a goddamned college newspaper.

For face-saving's sake, something had to change, and Wilpers was a likely target. This fall, those initial ad buys that are keeping the thing afloat will come up for renewal, and short of actually making the paper good, Russel Pergament has to at least look like he's trying to turn things around.

Real change might be tough. To this day, story ideas appear to suffer from an over-reliance on Pergament's famed stack of story idea reference cards. Wilpers had initially promised that the paper would differentiate itself from the Metro because staffers would only be writing enterprise stories. "Russel has said, 'Don't tell me something I already know,' " he said at the time. Wilpers didn't want to retread "yesterday's news."

That might've been nice.

THIS SHIT has bothered us for weeks, and we're not over it yet. Can somebody explain how a sentence like this - "Picking Boston's best Irish pub is a little like picking the loveliest clover in County Kildare" - made it into Boston magazine's annual Best of Boston issue? Prose like that is why the world has editors in the first place. Isn't it?

SPEAKING OF THE VOMIT on our shoes, Media Farm just picked up Stuff@night's Hot 100 issue. "Who doesn't love a nice salad when the heat hits? We gluttons with joneses for only the biggest, baddest salads, that's who. Come lunchtime, the Metropolitan Club rocks the roughage with its mix-and-match mélanges ... " Cokewhore-to-English translation, anybody? Please?

FORMER BOSTON HERALD business reporter Jesse Noyes started writing for the Boston Business Journal this past week. We wish him well, though we'll miss having him at the Herald. Who're we supposed to get to write about us now?