• by Val Brickates Kennedy , March 3, 2014

Boston Globe publisher John Henry is wasting no time rolling out new products to help expand the financially troubled newspaper's readership and advertising bases.

Just days after announcing the Globe would target New England snowbirds with a Florida edition, Boston Globe Media has unveiled a new website targeted at Boston's vibrant tech-innovation community.

The new site, called BetaBoston.com, will cover developments in VC funding, life sciences, biotech, medical devices, robotics, big data and other emerging technology fields, according to Boston Globe Media. The free site will feature reporting from Globe tech columnist Scott Kirsner, newly hired tech writers Kyle Alspach and Dennis Keohane, and Globe business writer Callum Borchers. Alspach was most recently tech editor of the Boston Business Journal.

Globe Media is pitching the site to advertisers as an effective way to reach members of the start-up, VC and research communities.

There's definitely room in the Boston media market for more regional tech and start-up coverage. Despite the fact that the Boston/Cambridge area remains one of the world's most productive technology incubators, news coverage has dwindled due to massive staffing cutbacks in the media industry on both the national and local levels. In recent years, coverage of the region's core tech and medical industries has been dominated largely by the Globe and the Boston Business Journal, with some help from a far leaner Boston Herald and online players such as Xconomy and Streetwise Media's BostInno.

"We already cover technology in our business section, but this is something altogether different," said BetaBoston editor Michael Morisy, in a statement. "It's a standalone, branded site that embraces a specialized but very significant community in Boston. BetaBoston's focus will be on companies and people that change the game in their industry, whether they're three-person startups or multinationals."