Yet Pergament offers convincing evidence, at least temporarily, that BostonNOW can find a niche in the local media landscape despite these challenges. He even makes a case that today’s bleak newspaper environment will actually work in BostonNOW’s favor.
“We’ve competed over the years with a lot of other newspapers that are extremely well-funded — excessively well-funded,” Pergament said in his rapid-fire rasp during an interview in the paper’s Downtown Crossing headquarters. At 59, he has the build and mien of a skinny, hyper 20-year-old. Put another way, he looks the way he thinks newspapers should be. “If you gotta be lean, highly disciplined, you put out, in my opinion, a paper that is more productive. And you survive.”
This is just the beginning of the BostonNOW pitch. Why pick this particular moment to return to Boston, I ask? “Boston is a very cyclical economy; it has its highs and lows,” Pergament answers. “I think we’re catching Boston at the low point of the wave. I think biotech is gonna be huge here; a lot of technology companies are coming back; and I am — I believe in Boston.”
Then, without missing a beat, Pergament switches from economic seer and civic cheerleader to media theorist, offering a crafty twist on the newspaper industry’s collective woes: the lesson isn’t that newcomers don’t have a place in the newspaper business, but that they’re the only ones who can save it.
Given Boston’s bevy of students and young professionals, he argues, “there is a clear need — particularly if it’s different — for another paper. And the decision we’ve made — the determination or the hope — is that the marketplace has gotten ahead of the newspapers. All of them. That the arrival of our social media, coupled with the fragmentation of media and the personalization of media, has created something different, and the same old thing is not reaching people the way it used to. Hence our hope, our kind of struggle, to define with our reader input this new channel.”
Readers should note that these arguments — like many Pergament makes — have less impact in print than when he makes them face-to-face. Detached from his persona, they’re easy to second-guess: isn’t biotech already huge here, for example? And what’s the difference between social media and personalized media? In person, though, a single question addressed to Pergament generates a torrent of verbiage, one that includes multiple rationales and critiques and virtually no silence, and you’ve got to fight just to follow the argument and maintain some kind of critical detachment.
At one point, for example, I ask Pergament whether BostonNOW’s emphasis on reader engagement — the paper is webcasting its news meetings, wooing bloggers as print contributors, and providing online comment threads for every story — is a natural fit for the free-commuter-daily model. When readers finish their evening commute, what are the chances they’ll hunker down at the computer with that morning’s paper?
