Earlier this month, the free commuter daily BostonNow unveiled its $1,000 Name Contest and commenced hyping it in earnest. The premise is simple: if readers can find their first name anywhere inside the paper on a given week, they fill out a form in the paper or online (name, phone, where they got the paper, etc.) for a chance to win — wait for it — one thousand dollars.
Sound familiar? After Rupert Murdoch purchased the Boston Herald back in 1982, the tabloid unveiled the numbers game known as Wingo (or, as usually rendered by the Herald, “WINGO!”) Sometimes, readers who played Wingo won cash; other times, they got shopping sprees or new cars. They also got their pictures in the paper. But whatever the payoff, the operating principle was the same: Wingo was essentially a way to bribe readers into picking up the paper. (An unfortunate side effect was the derisive re-naming of the paper’s Herald Square headquarters as “Wingo Square,” a moniker that persists to this day —in part because Herald management insists on trotting Wingo back out every few years.)
Say this for Wingo, though: it produced some gloriously terrible prose, as Herald reporters unlucky enough to draw the Wingo beat tried to satisfy their corporate masters while subversively winking at the rest of us. An example, from April 2004: “Boston Bruins goalie Andrew Raycroft is not just cool, he’s humble, handsome and absolutely wild about Mohegan Sun’s WINGO!”
So, can the $1,000 Name Contest fill the void left by Wingo? Sadly, it seems unlikely. For starters, there’s a major nomenclature gap: $1,000 Name Contest may be boring as sin, but it doesn’t invite mockery in quite the same way Wingo did. Plus, BostonNow hasn’t been covering its game as a beat of its own.
In fact, it seems that the $1,000 Name Contest is not long for this world. “You know, the circulation managers liked this,” BostonNow mastermind Russel Pergament says. “And we said we’d do it for a few weeks, just to create a little excitement. But I don’t think it’s going to last much longer.”
