Giving your content for free to middlemen: as stupid as it sounds or totallyawesome.com?
BostonNow is the name of a daily free newspaper planned to be launched sometime this year. Its competitor will be Metro Boston. Since Price and Place - to speak Marketing Mix language - are pretty much set, and since Promotion is likely not an important market driver in the world of free daily newspapers, BostonNow is apparently trying to differentiate its Blue Ocean-reddening Product by opening up the newspaper to amateur content creators:
BostonNOW … will incorporate both traditional and citizen journalism. 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. We will promote your work prominently both in the paper and on the website, not in a “local blogs†or “reader photos†ghetto.
Is it a good idea to allow a middleman to use one’s copy and art for free?
If your goal is to be read by as many people as possible, you might want to consider BostonNow’s pitch.
If you think getting published in BostonNow might drive more traffic to your site, you might want to consider BostonNow’s pitch.
If you’re afraid getting published in BostonNow might dilute your website readership, then you might want to keep your content exclusively on your site.
If you don’t want to expand readership beyond the handful of friends for whom you currently blog, then you probably shouldn’t hook up with BostonNow.
One yet to be answered question is which form of retardation, figuratively speaking, readers prefer during their morning commute: Truncated wire stories about six-legged cats in inland China or expansive rants about how puddles make one’s feet wet? I’m inclined to guess the former, as such stories have a sense of global worldliness about them. But how could Metro Boston respond when BostonNow unleashes expansive rants based on truncated wire stories about six-legged cats in inland China?
One can describe the proposed value chain by repeated paraphrasing of one of the gags in Idiocracy, The Movie That Must Be Neither Shown Nor Watched:
“Fuck you, I’m writing.”
“Fuck you, I’m truncating.”
“Fuck you, I’m blogging.”
“Fuck you, I’m aggregating.”
“Fuck you, I’m reading.”
Professor Media Critic Dan Kennedy sees BostonNow’s obvious potential:
Handled right, though, BostonNOW could wind up being a better read than Metro. Then, too, I’ve seen cereal boxes that are a better read than Metro.
