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There’s a new blog in town

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Eye Weekly lauched Eye Daily today, a web-exclusive partner to the free alt weekly mag. As the name implies, it’ll be updated daily with feature stories, such as Chris Bilton’s investigation into the campaign to raise the minimum wage. It also includes a new and improved blog, which will provide book, theatre, restaurant and music reviews, sports updates, arts info, as well as reports and discussion on City Hall by Eye Weekly city editor and Spacing contributor Edward Keenan and Spacing managing editor Dale Duncan (that’s me! — note personal bias here).

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11 comments

  1. How about I balance your personal bias with my own? 😉

    NOW has started posting expanded online content as well, and NOW writers have begun blogging.

    I think it’s about time. Mags like eye and NOW having expanded online content strikes a nice balance between the rigeur of a print publication with the open dialogue of an online venue.

    (Yes, I know, spacing beat them both to it.)

  4. Yessir, Steve, it’ll be updated. We got ourselves and online editor and a budget and everything. The last one got frequent updates for a month or two, before the staff interest faded off (voluntary system, no one in charge, no monetary incentives). Then, for a while it was updated three or four times a week by Ms. Duncan, then… we killed it.

    Not sure we ever figured out what exactly that blog was supposed to be. Now we have a Sprts blog, and our sports blogger knows what he wants that to be; and a city hall blog, that Dale and I know what we want to do with; and then there’s the main Eye Daily blog, which will be an all out daily extention of the regular arts and city coverage in the paper.

    I hope you like it.

    Mr. Smith — I don’t see your name on the roll of NOW bloggeristas. What gives. Tell ’em the city hall columnist from that other weekly gets to blog… though Susan’s doing OK, but someone ought to introduce her to hyperlinks.

  6. I have to wonder if NOW and EYE will put have porn banners on their blogs. Ads for Escorts and Executive Relief services pay for their print publications so why not the online versions as well?

  7. Hamish> The porn is in the back though, never at front of book. And it’s a convention that alt weeklies have porn in the back. It’s the revenue model that sustains it.

    On a blog, everything that comes up on the first page is essentially front of book, so the comparisons doesn’t work so well.

  8. Thanks for your question, Hamish. As a matter of fact, we do sell adult classified advertising on our website (see http://www.eye.net/classifieds/adultengine.php?adultindex). But most of the sex workers we work with aren’t interested in advertising a banner on our city hall blog when they could put their ad on the adult classified section of ur website where their clients will look for it.

  9. Ed> My hope is that if a sex worker “did” want to put a banner on the City Hall blog page that you would decline. Perhaps this is my prudish nature, but it seems like an unfortunate combination.

  10. “Mr. Smith — I don’t see your name on the roll of NOW bloggeristas. What gives. Tell ‘em the city hall columnist from that other weekly gets to blog…”

    Heh.

    …Stay tuned. 😉

  11. Shawn: “And it’s a convention that alt weeklies have porn in the back.”

    Ahh, I remember back in the day when NOW was the thing and it was thick and had lots of real, conventional classifieds in the back, and a wee section called “personals” – and that was where all the sexy ads were – it was entertaining to sit there at Sunday brunch and read the best ones (usually involving some fetish) to eachother. Tittilating, even.

    Around the beginning of the 1990’s, a section called “Business Classifieds” arrived and it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger… To the state we’re in now, where, as you say, ‘it’s the revenue model that sustains [the paper]”.

    I know that times have changed and craigslist and ebay have sucked all the energy in classifieds away from newspapers, but I think it’s a bit of a shame that the so-called ‘alt-weeklies’ have come to depend on porn to publish themselves. It was not always the case.