It is sad to see what’s become of boston.com. Years ago it was a juggernaut – the singular website in Greater Boston for news, sports, events and everything else. It was the homepage on my browser for probably a decade or more, and I spent hours on the site every day.
These days it is a shell of itself – the only way I even stumble upon it anymore is via a random click-bait post on Facebook or Twitter. I might spend less than a minute reading a story – most of which are downright mediocre – and I am quickly on to a different site. It even looks crappy – it has been designed down to make it significantly less appealing.
I get why the Globe scuttled boston.com – they needed to move readers over and behind the paywall to bostonglobe.com as print subscriptions plummeted. I see it myself – I stopped getting the Globe during the week years ago, and before long I’ll stop Sunday delivery as well – no need to cut down more trees to read stories that are yesterday’s news. Paying for an online subscription is the right thing to do – it makes total sense that we not only support journalism, but good local journalism. And the Globe website is excellent – it looks and performs like it should. It just is sad that the Globe couldn’t make both work symbiotically somehow. Hopefully the Globe didn’t lose all of us faithful boston.com fans.
Boston.com was special – Lisa DeSisto and her team created something cutting edge and exciting and awesome, and for a time it set the market as the gold standard for local news websites. But time marches on and we all move on to the next big – and hopefully better – thing. RIP boston.com – you were a heck of a shooting star…