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Did you wonder where your Boston NOW person was this morning? The commuter paper, which promised to bring bloggers together with standard print media, has folded. The Globe's business ticker said the paper shut down "immediately" today due to "tough economic conditions being faced by its primary investors in Iceland."
Boston NOW's own website (link via b0st0n LJ) points the finger squarely at the land of Bjork: "This healthy, growing 119,000-circulation daily is suddenly compelled to halt operations due to rapidly deteriorating economic conditions in Iceland where interest rates reached 15.5% Thursday, the krona, their currency, has declined over 20% against the dollar since January, and inflation is now at 8.7%."
Boston NOW had its fair share of stumbles from the beginning, but some of that could have been attributed to the merging of new and old media. Their first editor, John Wilpers, whom Bostonist had the pleasure to meet with, had a real vision for where he wanted the paper to go, but he exited fairly early on. Eventually the paper became known for unfortunate typos and cover boo-boos. But more of the focus was on the travails of the Metro, not the supposedly scrappy Boston NOW.
Michael Femia and Victoria Welch contributed to this post.
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I hope this doesn't mean the T is going to scale back on their recycling program. I've been very happy to see the paper ClearStreams in more and more T stops every day.
AFFJORD! you didn't!
Is it possible that the Finnish currency is the only European currency worth less than the dollar? Incredible!
Seriously, though, it is too bad about BostonNOW. I thought they were on the forefront of innovation in the dying newspaper business - they made it the people's paper by including bloggers' articles and photos. Sure, their fact checking could use some work.. but as a relatively new paper, it was still working out the kinks.
I will be sad to no longer see this paper on the street corners.. and even sadder since my non-profit's blog was one of those frequently featured...