The Sun-Times, which is sort of Chicago's equivalent of the Herald (only with fewer professionally taken photos), is scheduled to launch news aggregator sites in 70 cities across the country tomorrow, including Boston. The Sun-Times extols:
The effort is designed to offer content in a manner similar to websites such as Deadspin and Buzzfeed, which aggregate news stories while offering additional commentary.
For a site that's supposed to launch tomorrow, the Boston edition is just a tad barren: The lead story right now is about the Celtics starting roster and has nothing about something else people might be talking about in Boston.
The rest of the Boston-specific content consists of listicles lists that might seem more appropriate on a Boston version of spoof site like Clickhole: "Ranking 11 Boston Nicknames (including "City of Notion" - um, what?) and 7 seals straight chilling at the Boston Aquarium.
The Nieman Journalism Lab reports the Sun-Times network is looking for a local media partner to do actual news stories:
The idea here is a fairly simple one. Launch all the sites, and then use local media player partners - a mobile provider, a TV or radio station, a chain of weeklies, a monthly magazine - to grow awareness and traffic in markets. No partners will be announced until at least November. The partner profile: A company that knows it should be in the digital game, but isn’t yet in, and doesn’t want to invest in the work of getting in itself.
Also hopefully one that knows the name of the local aquarium.
But who might partner with them? There are only two local media entities around here that aren't online - the Boston Courant and the Bulletin chain, and both have made very conscious decisions not to go online.
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Comments
That listicle is abhorrent
By Nick
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 12:16am
Even for a listicle.
#1 is Brockton, not Boston. No need to even comment on #2.
edit: I found the source of this nonsense. It has all eleven and would have gotten the author an F on a ninth grade research paper. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_nicknames
20 Places to Visit on the Freedom Trail
By SwirlyGrrl
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 11:02am
OMG??? WTF?!? I CAN'T BELIEVE #3!!!!!!
Boston.com is losing people every day
By FredQuimby
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 1:29am
They turned it into a mini Buzzfeed/Huffingtonpost.
Loading a page became a nightmare. 3 embedded videos in the same page would all come on automatically and you would have 3 separate news anchors talking at the same time about completely different topics.
Now some genius out in Chicago thinks we want something similar?
I can picture it now. Stories like "How lazy are Bostonians compared to the rest of the world?"
Maybe they can hire that one crazy guy from Boston.com with the 5000 screen names who copy and pastes the same right wing talking points into every comment section.
In the mean time, Ill be hanging out here.
Also
By anon
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 3:21am
Patch tried this "news aggregator" function online and it failed enough that it mostly shut down. A short-lived free paper tried to do this in hard-copy 5-7 years ago, and it also did not last long.
Aggregating content from other sites requires an ability to sort out the gold from the rocks. Dumping everything that's kinda-sorta-relevant-maybe-at-least-it-occupies-space like a high schooler running out of time on a test is not something people want to read.
Flash
By cybah
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 6:26am
This would be why Chrome crashes a lot.. from the flash videos. bah
and LOL at the comment on comment section. So true.. so very true.
Boston Dot Crap sucks now. It really sucks. I'd love to meet whoever thought switching BDC to a buzzfeed style format, because I'd smack them on the head. It just blows now. I wonder what their readership is like now... slowly going down the tubes..
I gave up on boston.com and went over the paywall
By Nancy
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 7:10am
As much as I'm not a fan of the Globe (or the Herald), I gave in and pay for bostonglobe.com. Boston.com is junk.
This new site, on the other hand, appears to be awesome. Hello Kitty AND Tom Brady on the front page? Sounds like a winner to me!
Pssst... Try Private Window Browsing - Don't Tell Anyone!
By Elmer
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 2:04pm
I think that's the point
By Nick
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 2:17pm
The best I can tell the whole purpose of Boston.com is to frustrate readers into signing up for bg.com.
I've said it before and I'll say it again
By Nancy
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 8:52pm
Well played, Boston Globe. Well played indeed.
Now if we could just get Love Letters on bostonglobe.com so I don't have to wait five minutes for it to come up on boston.com, I'll be all set.
Two points:
By anon
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 8:26am
Two points:
1 - You need to install Ad Block Plus. There is sane website advertising (such as what Adam uses here). And then there is you've got to be fucking kidding me advertising, which Boston.com uses. I temporarily disabled it on the homepage yesterday and suddenly my entire screen looked like some snowboarding movie promoting LL Bean.
2 - That guy with the 5,000 screen names and the talking points already has a "job" with Fox News. (http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/10/27/paid-comme...) ((Someone posted this here yesterday I believe)).
Yep, I will gladly whitelist
By anon
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 10:33am
Yep, I will gladly whitelist sites (like this one) with reasonably placed ads. BDC is unusable without adblock, not that it's even worth visiting anyway.
Funny story about ads on UHub
By Nancy
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 10:51am
I have a screenshot of it on my home computer so maybe I'll try to update this post later when I'm home.
One day I got two ads right on UHub right next to each other. One was for a pizza place and the second one was for an eating disorder treatment center.
At the time, I was in treatment for an eating disorder and my favorite food is pizza. If I do say so myself, that is some pretty accurate advertisement targeting.
So long as
By Wiffleball
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 7:34am
the local sock puppets have a place to call each other "moonbat" and "low-information voter" that's all that matters.
I only
By bulgingbuick
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 8:14am
go to Boston.com when I want to know what John Henry is thinking so therefore I never go to Boston.com.
Devry journalism students
By gotdatwmd
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 9:19am
Devry journalism students need jobs - which usually translates to $20 an article for someone who recently graduated but can barely put pen to paper so a site can generate ad revenue, eventually becoming a soapbox for bloggers. At least that's what Gawker and all these other "news" sites are. Hopefully this won't be the same.
...I can aggregate all the
By BarryA
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 9:41am
...I can aggregate all the crappy news out there without someone doing it for me. What we need is quality, relevant, unbiased reporting in a simple format. I am not impressed with crappy, media rich, poor design.
That would require local
By anon
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 2:34pm
That would require local professional journalists. To dig them up you'll need a shovel. =(
Man, this is weak sauce
By Finn
Fri, 10/31/2014 - 10:52pm
Man, this is weak sauce
Rocket science
By Ron Newman
Sat, 11/01/2014 - 4:14pm
If you were to pick just one spaceflight-related news story to put on your page today, would you really choose "NBC is developing a reality show with Virgin Galactic" ?
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