The Web: Online publishing ascending

CHICAGO, March 2 (UPI) -- An avid sports fan who produces a Web log on the Boston Red Sox is bought out by a major daily newspaper and hired as a sports producer for its Web site. This may sound like some wishful thinking, like some tenuous scenario in one of those fantasy baseball leagues many fans join, but the blog BostonDirtDogs.com, founded by Steve Silva, is now part of The Boston Globe online. Silva is now filing regular reports from the World Series champion Red Sox spring-training site in Florida."Newspapers are doing a lot of experiments online," said Chuck Richard, vice president and lead analyst at Outsell Inc., a research firm in Boston that tracks online advertising and publishing. "They're trying to go beyond the old model of newspapers and become community resources for their readers."