Hi! I don't know about where you live — which is why I'm starting this thread, I want to know! — but in our city it's gotten hard to know what's going on in arts/culture events. Our alt-weekly (my alma mater) died almost a decade ago, and the daily paper barely even pretends to try to list what's going on. There are some half-useful lists here and there — the tourism bureau maintains a limited one, a blogger runs a list of downtown events — but nobody providing the knowledgeable-curation function that a good alt-weekly calendar used to.
So some friends and I are trying to change that, a few weeks ago we started a free weekly email newsletter that 4-5 of us are putting together. Not trying to be comprehensive (not listing every damn karaoke night or guy-with-acoustic-guitar-playing-classic-rock), but hitting the highlights as we see them.
Anyway, what I'd like to hear about and see examples of are good online arts/entertainment listings from other places. Particularly interested if anyone has things that function as standalone apps or anything like that, since I feel like that might be the most natural form for this to take eventually.
I feel like this is probably a big need a lot of places, just curious who's doing it well.
This is what we're doing at the moment, it's very much a work in progress: https://conta.cc/3HfJb03
We started it as an email newsletter because it's quick, cheap and easy to do, but it will probably become more than that eventually.
This is a great question! Conventional wisdom seems to have it that the internet made magazines like Time Out irrelevant but actually there’s nothing that has really replaced them afaict, at least not anything comprehensive (that I’m aware of) and certainly nothing with an editorial sensibility, where you get the feeling the people who run the website are probably pretty cool and have opinions about the places they highlight. There are niche listing services like Resident Adviser, and music services with app integration like SongKick but those are like, global
― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 25 January 2023 15:50 (one year ago) link
Thanks! And yeah, I'm just curious who if anyone is doing a good job of this these days. Whenever I go visit another city I look to see what's going on, and it's often hard to find a good calendar. Time Out does do a pretty good job with their online listings in cities where they operate, but obviously that's not many. (And their online interface is kind of annoying.)