Guardian Media Group close Manchester's weekly listings magazine, City Life

For all the media commentators out there, what do you think will happen? There's been speculation that Time Out will step in, which would be great. Is it likely that there simply won't be anything to replace it and Manchester will be left listings-free?

In order to keep our words and names out there myself and a few friends are planning to set up a weekly listings mailout with a basic website/blog. If anyone has any advice on how best to do this then that'd be great. I think London has one of these - www.putmedown.com ?

And if anyone has advice on how to jump onto a new listings ship before all the other rival freelancers do, then that'd be great too.

for FUCK'S SAKE. that is fucking criminal. they can afford to run an entire web operation that makes not a penny; spend zillions on a format change about which only six people actually cared; spend a fucking fortune on pointless flummery for the london papers ... yet they can't keep city life struggling along on its shoestring.

jesus wept. that's appalling.

the listings website is a great idea too. get to it.

as for what will happen: i have no idea. i don't know if time out are in a position to expand or not. at this point in time, all any serious media company will care about is: can they make cash from this? i don't think there's much long-term planning or altruism going on - everybody's too busy trying to survive.

apart from GMG, of course, which is burning cash on over-staffed and under-read london papers.

Apparently it was losing £1,000 a week. I don't know the circulation but I wonder if a price rise could have saved it.

And yeah, it's a disgrace. Manchester - and any other city - needs a solid listings magazine. I just hope it doesn't go like Liverpool with dozens and dozens of badly-written fanziney free mags.

and of course, feel free to e-mail if you think i can be of help at all.

Aside: how does the List do? Does it help that it covers Edinburgh and Glasgow? (x-post: should CL have covered Liverpool as well?)

ian: what's the union saying about city life? i assume there was a staff chapel?

They could claim that but it'd be pretty laughable to do so.
They have, at best, only ever featured certain nights and clubs (say, about 20 a week out of 150 plus) chosen seemingly whimsically without a ha'penny worth of care nor interest as to wether a featured club is either a) ever any good or b) ever very well attended.

There's a certain club night that has recently and consistently been rammed to the rafters each time, causing local hype and fuss a-plenty and getting fantastic responses accordingly. Number of times featured in The Guide = nil. Whereas certain other nights play to 2 goths and a dog yelping to be let out and get in every single time.

I wouldn't have them advise me where to sh it let alone anything else if u want the truth.

I think the way the structure of it is that the Scott Trust also owns GMG, but the latter can run its operations however it wants, unlike the special protection afforded to the Guardian. So basically, "You make us lots of plebby cash from AutoTrader, and treat your staff how you like" or something. Maybe.

for the readers or the writers/vendors?

As such, I've just (extremely foolishly) taken on the role of gig listings editor on A Newish Music Magazine's website. Wish me luck, I'm doing it gratis cos they've got no money...

And all the best to former City Life staffers/stringers, I wish you well.

-- It'strue

I don't live in Manchester and have never worked on the Guide, so take this with a pinch of salt if you want to... but with listings pages it's usually the responsibility of the club promoter to send in their details if they wish to be listed. On time. If they miss the deadline then that's their tough shit.

ha ha, bless. unfortunately we're too busy telling claire sweeney's pr we really don;t want an exclusive interview to chase up random listings each week, though i take your point. and even if we do snaffle up half-a-dozen nights we might have otherwise missed, there's still dozens more that slip through the net - most of whom have no desire to be listed anyway.

for what it's worth, i don;t think Time Out is going to step in and save City Life. or if they are, they're keeping it v quiet.

They'd farm the contract out to some local operation, as they have done with Bangkok, Dubai, Hong Kong and various other expat outposts.

-- CharlieNo4 (starsandheroe...), November 29th, 2005.

so otm it hurts. trying to find out what's going on in any city anywhere without actually living there is impossible, always has been.

-- Hello Sunshine (fiver_the_bunn...), November 29th, 2005.

if that happens i'm leaving the country. i'd seriously rather die than see that happen.

I thought the whole point of the GMG was to be ruthless and money-driven expressly so the Scott Trust couldafford to be all indulgent with its papers. The Unlimited websites must lose more than £1000 a week, surely. Don't they cost £16m a year?

Either way, this is *definitely* the time to launch yr listing websites. Britain is really crying out from some Craiglist-style action too. Tie those together and you are on to a winner.

get one myspace.com...

A bit drastic, given that you wouldn't be legally obliged to buy it or anything.

Besides, some would say that Manchester alone isn't big enough to support a weekly listings mag (hence what this thread it all about).

you go and tell n3wsqvest that, nick!

the guardian's place in the future is sure as fuck not going to be based on a full-content website that costs nothing to read. and as soon as they start charging: bang, end of guardian "unlimited".

sure, it's a lovely suite of sites. but they must be shitting bricks trying to work out what the HELL they do to make it make them some cash.

Given that it's GU Talk that results in the biggest number of page hits on the site (and hence dictates how much they can charge advertisiers), they really couldn't afford for that to happen.

oh sorry, there is another way, as practiced by the (loss-making, anyway) Independent, and that's charging more than the cost of a copy of the paper to read archived articles. anyone know if that's payinf off at all? I doubt it.

CharlieNo4: No, it isn't. And it won't.

the rolling London gigging thread

So, at the moment it may not look like online advertising revenues are enough to sustain a site with overheads as large as guardian unlimited. Maybe. But the long-term future sure as hell is online not print, so the important thing is to position onself as a leader in that market, because one day, even if we can't exactly see it now, I bet you news brands will find a way of being profitable online, and if you've got pockets deep enough, you don't want to lose your place by fretting too much about the balance sheet now. Yes, this sounds perilously close to late 90s dotcom mania logic, but you know, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. You've got to take some risks if you want to stay alive.

If it's not obvious how to make cash now, it never will be.

Says the man who confesses to being more hopeless with money than anyone he knows!

They're only "giving stuff away free" in the same sense that ITV or the Metro are giving it away free. No, the ad revenues aren't enough at the moment, but plenty of businesses start out by making a loss for one reason or another. Advertising supported businesses included. Sky, anyone?

They said that about the radio and TV, too...

Every drugs pusher in the history of forever to thead... ;-)

And advertising models aren't going to pick up the slack, btw. You can't charge as much for online adverts just as you can't charge as much for content: you're in a far, far larger playing field and have very few exclusive eyes.

PS Alba: I can be hopeless with cash because I know where it's coming from. GU is hopeless with it. full stop.

And by the year 2000 we will all be travelling around with our own personal jetpacks and taking holidays on the moon...

http://www.spaced-out.org.uk/images/look.jpg

seriously...

nobody has pockets that deep. the guardian has fucked itself: it's got this great site that everybody loves, but the SECOND it goes, er, guys, can we have some money? then everybody will drop it like a hot brick and move en masse to ... the publicly funded BBC.

the future of media is certainly electronic, as opposed to dead-tree-based, but it is sure as fuck not a static sitting-in-front-of-the-web model. what papers need to be doing now is investing in ideas and making contingency plans, not shovelling cash into a model that is a) a waste of cash, and b) will probably be supplanted sooner than we think.

by what? i don't know. mobile technology in some way is the key here, and nobody's got that cracked yet.

xpost

Actually, in this bright new net world, the papers will be even more fucked than I thought. Their high-end high-price display advertising will collapse as budgets switch to advertiser's own online sites and the Google Ads that drive people to them; their low-end classifieds/job listings/property stuff will all go to the specialist sites. Hmm.

The future of publishing lies in that Total Recall-style e-paper stuff. A page like a laptop screen that's magazine-sized, can be folded or rolled-up and can be used to show anything. The majority of overheads in publishing are paper and printing so when that eventually becomes commonplace, it'll complete flip the magazine and newspaper industry on its head. So, uh, roll on 2047.

Mobile technology is fairly obviously a part of what we're all talking about when we use the word 'online', simon, yes. Most people aren't going to stop buying newspapers until they've got a nice portable alternative, and is going to mean innovations in screen/liquid paper technologies etc.

The internet will swallow all the old forms of communication. TV and Radio will be delivered online,

You're kind of contradicting yourself here, stet. If you're right and there's never going to be any way of delivering news in a profitable way online then sooner or later all news businesses are going to go to the wall. As simon says, no one has infinitely deep pockets or an endless supply of rich stupid backers. So who is going to be providing the things that will "swallow" all the traditional channels?

Oh right, the government! So you forsee a time where the BBC really is the only news and entertainment content company? Hurrah! I like the BBC.

Newspapers don't sell news; they sell readers to advertisers. If there isn't a viable way of making money from readers online -- and one hasn't turned up in the past 10 years -- then there won't be enough money for them to report the news, no. Telly and Radio will be fine because their consumption models will remain -- people will listen to audio-only programmes and watch video shows -- but newspapers? er...

er, well, the guardian isn't. where's their mobile service? roundpoint.com's telegraph and independent stuff pwns them.

the guardian's web presence is magnificent if you're in front of a PC screen. but that sure as fuck ain't the future. it's not a loss-leader ... it's just a loss.

and, er, let's not write off newspapers JUST yet. they've survived a lot: they're not going to disappear overnight. if the guardian's policy is to manage decline, why is it wasting all that cash on shiny new berliner presses?

bottom line: they've fucked up by creating something great. they can't back out. so ... oh look, the regional acquisitions suffer.

thanks, GMG. you smug fucking london twats.

- quality content
- superb user experience design
- easy opt-in email sign up
- latest issue on web [as well as html based email]

Flavourpill - London
http://london.flavourpill.net/current.jsp
they also do NYC, SF, LA and Chicago

Kultureflash
http://www.kultureflash.net/

if you don't want to go alone e.g costs of web hosting, managing a bulk email system, designing webpages with content management systems, designing rich html based email etc maybe you could contact the above to set up a branded partnership/ joint venture for a Manchester weekly email listings. They supply the tech & design infrastructure, you do the content and share in the ad revenue?

one of the biggest hurdles of a new email listings start up, is how to reach your target audience? your could distribute flyers locally promoting the service.

xpost: or take out adverts in GMG publications :)

if they're going to provide the week's highlights in an email, they should also at least link to a web page with FULL AND COMPLETE LISTINGS as well, otherwise suspicious types like me automatically assume they're not getting the full picture.

-- Hello Sunshine

It certainly is big enough IMO.

So you really think that there is something intrinisic to the written word that makes it unable to carry advertising in the future, where audio and video can? Have some imagination! Think outside the blimmin box!

I don't even know if it will be straightforward advertising piggybacking on the news. Maybe the Guardian (and the Herald!) will sell their content through other channels that are subscription based. Screens in gym machines! I don't know bloody know. The point is it seems unlikely that there'll end up being NO WAY of providing written news in a way that makes money. Call it a bloody hunch, if you want. Capitalism is ingenious!

Anyway, I don't see why you're so much more comfortable about the TV advertising model, stet. Hello! HD recorders! Bittorrent! I read this kind of daft thing in... the Guardian the other week that said it would be OK cause advertisers were finding ways of tapping into the hi-speed fastforwarding viewer market (blipverts, almost). Well, maybe, but when I watch things on bittorrent the ads are completely taken out. There's no "fast-forwarding". Everything is going to change, I don't know how. Should newspapers be bold or just manage decline?

Maybe one day "citizen journalists" will provide all our news or whatever. In which case the Guardian is fucked full stop. But then so is everyone else who trys to stay in the commercial media content producing market. But that's the worst case scenario. In many other scenarios, the Guardian name will live on in some way, and staking its place as a leading brand, not just in the UK, but internationally, seems the best option in a very uncertain market. If things really are irrevocably fucked for the professional publishing model then good for the Guardian for at least going out TRYING, rather than just muttering about it all.

Any other ideas would be great too. I'll check into those other places and speak to 'my people' about hooking up with them. Silly question but I don't suppose there's any hope of making pocket money out of a venture like this? Not that that's the point, but it'd help keep wolves from the door, etc.

Basic plans are for a weekly mailout relating to clubbing foremost and some gigs. Minimal editorial, highlighting half a dozen or so 'must sees'. Linked to a site with more info, more in depth listings for each day. Couple of features/interviews/articles per week. Stripped down & bare like ILX/Craigslist. I'll ask about to see what would work better, may scrap the gigs idea.

Because we're talking different timeframes. I don't think newspapers are about to disappear any time soon either. At least not all of them.

And because the berliner is hott and tabloid is not.

no, i don't think so somehow. otherwise we wouldn't have papers: we'd have the pub.

nick, my point is simple: none of us know what the future holds. but the guardian is stuck down a costly cul-de-sac with GU, and can't get out. and because of its blinkered bloody-mindedness, it is now having to sell everything else, and to hell with people's jobs as long as the smug wankers in GU Towers in london are OK.

this is what we in the trade call a cunts' trick.

Hurrah!

I think a tabloid "quality" – I hate that term and they're not broadsheets anymore so bah – posh papers could be OK in theory, and the Indy and SH aren't bad, but it'll take some time before you clever designers work out how to really make them work properly. Maybe layout should be freer and more like magazine or something? I dunno.

For the moment the lovely crinkly fold of the berliner is better than tabloid or broadsheet for me. Is there any prospect of other papers using GMG's printing capacity? Or is there none spare? Or would that be too much swallowing of pride? Or am I the only one who is bothered?

Manchester Craigslist
http://manchester.craigslist.org/

Manchester Gumtree
http://manchester.gumtree.com/

there is nothing stopping you putting up a free ad to your new venture on both of these.

I have no idea. They launched a PDA service years ago, but I'm not really talking about now, because I don't think the appropriate technology is here yet.

the guardian's web presence is magnificent if you're in front of a PC screen. but that sure as fuck ain't the future.

Well, not exactly (though we do spend rather a lot of our lives in front of one just now) but one of the possiblities is surely a "PC Screen" that's properly portable? Lots of flexible, even rollable electonic paper prototypes seem to be floating around just now.

... er, newspaper pages.

as you say: design and readibility is a huge part of all this. that's where the guardian (print format) has got it right - you can pick it up and instantly navigate around it with your eyes. with web newspapers, it's all links and text: you can't get the same at-a-glance thing going on.

i do feel this isn't the best thread for all this, though: there are two parallel discussions here. we only got on to the guardian online because GMG are cunts, after all :)

No, it's the consumption model I'm talking about. Audio and Video have captive audiences. And, yes, there are ways to skip those adverts and that's going to be a problem in the future, but there is no competition churning out free products of equal quality.

But the written word ... hell, GU is the perfect example of text content not carrying its weight in advertising and there's too much stuff on the net of equal quality and *free* for subscription models to ever work.

I'm sure the market can come up with a solution, but hugely subsidising dead models is not the way the market does that.

Think outside the box yes, but don't just stare at the box hoping it'll open. Or something.

xpost

The List. A cheap day return to Edinburgh from Glasgow is £8.20 and the journey time is just over 50 minutes, so not that different from Liverpool/Manchester. I suspect the List makes enough money during the Edinburgh Festival to susidise its activities for the rest of the year.

e.g Liverpool is European Capital of Culture in 2008 - they have be given millions by the EU to fund this.

is there currently a Liverpool listings mag?

is this the GMG way of dealing with an argument ... nick off for a pint and hope it wins itself? ;)

i understand that it is difficult to be as pro active as might be desirable, but ultimately, those listings are goign in to make your paper more attractive. tyhey sell your publication - i sure as hell dont buy time out for the editorial. journalists dont wait for the public to phone in stories, they go out and chase them. if listings are significant enough part of a publication to warrant publishing, in terms of increasing circulation, then you have to make a decision about how much resource you will devote to making sure that the listings are as accurate, relevant and interesting enough to your readership. if you make a commercial decision such as "this simply isnt worth pursuing, our readers dont buy our paper for listings" then scrap the section, thats fair enough, but assigning responsibility without sound commercial logic behind it is in the long term, fatal, it seems to me.

hahahahahah, hoooo! heheheh. [chokes on soup]

if listings are significant enough part of a publication to warrant publishing, in terms of increasing circulation, then you have to make a decision about how much resource you will devote to making sure that the listings are as accurate, relevant and interesting enough to your readership.

fair enough, but let me give you a scenario. i have a day and a half at most per week to process and upload about 300 emails onto our gig listings database. i work for nothing. oh, and i also apparently cover THE WHOLE COUNTRY.

i'll tell you now, there are not enough hours in the day for me to call all the gig venues in frickin' *Camden*, let alone anywhere else! If I'm not emailed, it doesn't go in, pure and simple - and many which are emailed, also don't go in, also due to time constraints.

tough shit, folks - you want to employ me, go right ahead...

time out is successful becasue one of its primary objectives is to provide listings. that it devotes a large chunk of its resources (i assume) eg. actually paying people to collate them, is reflected in the fact that i cant think of anything in this country that is able to provide such wide ranging*, comprehensive** and accurate*** listings for london. that there are a) enough things on in london to devote a magazine to b) enough of a readership to still pay increasing amounts to access tghose listings is the secret of its success. its true that it seems to be shrinking the listings focus of content, and featuring more guff editorial/features, might undercut my theory, but it still feels like a listings magazine, and appears from the outside to be doing ok on that.

* yes it does onkly cover a certain spectrum of events, loads of different types of things are missed. but given its wide scope, and pagination, it doesnt do badly.
** yes it misses an enourmous number of gigs, nights, clubs, shows etc etc....some dude scraping away on a laptop in a pub doesnt get in etc etc. but it still manages to catch a large amount of what is going on
*** yes, it is often dreadfully misleading. but ever tried using thwe guide? that is worse in my experience, for starters. time out is stil lthe most accurate listings guide ive seen.

You're making a massive, MASSIVE presumption here though - you're assuming that any event that isn't listed in Time Out, or The Guide, or any other listings-based publication, has been "missed" by a negligent editor.

Thos is clearly rubbish. Some submitted listings don't make the cut because they're inaccurate, or too insignificant, or incomplete, or otherwise lacking - or indeed, because the smarmy bassist once came on to the listings editor's sister, or whatever. There are a million reasons to make editorial choices, and these choices are made in listings just as much as they are in full-on copy.

Hell, at my old paper I'd cut bands because they had stupid names, cinemas because they had poncy titles, film showings because they infringed on my lovely cut-outs, anything that sounded pretentious, anything that involved hair bands, or just anything I didn't like. The listings are hack and burn territory, that's for sure.

now i feel bad. still, fuck it: most of the "events" involved the Happy Gang, and i always had my suspicions about them.

Leeds has the Leeds Guide (glossy fortnightly mag) with its associated website, plus leedsmusicscene, run by local promoter Dave Sugden, with a message board that seems to be populated by every band member and promoter in West Yorkshire. There are also a couple of laughable local wannabe style mags, full of advertorials for canalside apartments and eateries, but I don't think anyone's ever actually read them.

wasn't it hard-copy at one point?

haha xpost -- shit *and* a professional rival!

Huh-huh, huh-huh

Not that you're still bitter or anything...

im not ragging on listings editors per se, or trying to say that editors should be including everything and making sure that they go out to collect everything, just that i think the editors job is to match the listings page so it reflects what its target audience would be interested in. if it isnt able to do that successfully, then i cant see the point of bothering with such a section at all. the readers wont miss it, and you dont have to bother dealing with people trying to get you to publish their listings.

its difficult for me to empathise with the other side of the coin, as everytime i have tried to get listings published, i have been dealt with by turns rudely, unprofessionally or in an unbusinesslike manner, or just plain incomprehensibly.

i think it grates because whislt legitimate reasons for rejecting listings are fine, but rejecting listings "cos you dont like the name of the band" is pure smugness.
theres nothing wrong with being smug if you occupy the high ground. but with print media, to generalise, everytime you look at the ABCs, those numbers are going down, overall, save a few successes. Businesses (and im not talking about editors as such!) who act with contempt for customers and suppliers will ultimately suffer. thats it.

1) paid-for "listings-led" publications, eg time out, are produced to hellish deadlines by underpaid staff. they do not have the time to go out and pro-actively find listings - and anyway, where the hell would they begin? ringing everybody in the phone book to see if they happen to be putting on a club night?

they will, however, make an informed editorial judgement on what to print. as long as you're providing them the information within deadline, and with all the details they require, i can't see why they won't print it. unless you've shagged their sister, etc.

2) entertainment supplements that also carry listings, such as the guardian guide, are going to give waaay less of a fuck. i don't think anybody in the universe buys the guardian (or the paper stet and i worked for) for its listings: they're one of those additional-value services that newspapers include for the benefit of the few hundred readers who'd moan like buggery if they weren't there.

stet and i used to work 70-hour weeks on that paper. when a quarter-page advert came in on a thursday just as you were just putting the finishing touches to the arts section, you had a simple choice: redraw, re-sub and ruin a feature, or hack 60 lines out of the arts listings and hoy it in there. which one were people going to notice? clue: not the listings.

3) to be honest, people like ian and charlie and anyone else who actively wants to be involved in the provision of listings are beautiful, crazy, wonderful guys providing a great service. isn't the fact they're willing to spend time and effort turning scrappy bits of paper/e-mails saying "mi clubb iz onn thursdaye in town at the pubBb" into decent information enough, without expecting them to trawl the streets every night just in case they can hear the distant sound of a man with an iPod playing to three people?

since i took my first tentative steps into journalism more than ten years ago, i've dealt with an awful lot of promoters. like charlie says above: the ones who get their shit in print are the ones who provide concise, sensible information and understand the concept of deadlines. the ones who get fucked over are the ones who don't.

City Life - a Manchester entertainment magazine which began as a workers' co-operative - is in serious danger of being closed by Guardian Media.

Cost-cutting bosses want to shut the paper on December 7th and axe all the newspaper's staff - many of whom are members of the National Union of Journalists.

As an act of solidarity, a protest is being held outside the Guardian offices on 119 Farringdon Road at 1pm Friday 2nd December, and continued outside the offices of the Guardian Media Group, 75 Farringdon Road.

A simultaneous protest will be held outside the Guardian offices in Manchester.

City Life - a Manchester entertainment magazine which began as a workers' co-operative - is in serious danger of being closed by Guardian Media. Cost-cutting bosses want to shut the paper on December 7th and axe all the newspaper's staff - many of whom are members of the National Union of Journalists.

As an act of solidarity, a protest is being held outside the Guardian offices on 119 Farringdon Road at 1pm Friday 2nd December, and continued outside the offices of the Guardian Media Group, 75 Farringdon Road. A simultaneous protest will be held outside the Guardian offices in Manchester.

"we now distribute 6,000 free copies to residents living in the city centre.."

fck me i never knew that.

haha grimly i kiss you! very accurate sample email too - oh, except for the "onn thursdaye" bit, which about 30% of them leave out entirely...

shooting's too good for them :)

as for northcliffe, which HS mentions above: the difference there is that people (including our lot) are queuing up to buy the titles :(

I have a lovely mental image of half a dozen blokes standing around in a deserted nightclub, wondering why their gorgeous fliers had failed to attract a single punter...

ian: WORK WITH WILSON. it'll fall apart after five seconds, but what a glorious and fun five seconds they'll be.

(also, expect a package through your door in the next few days - was waiting for the series finale of CYE and it aired last night)

(xpost for Grimly)

Monday's MG had a whole article all about the state of regional publishing in the wake of the Northcliffe sale, but one obvious case study was lacking...