Monday, July 31, 2006

News with a guest list

Flavorpill, the slickly-designed weekly email that keeps young urbanites up to speed on essential info such as where to catch the latest punk-funk band or 23-year-old memoirist sensation, has launched a new subscription email service. Following recent expansions into literature, music, fashion and art-specific e-newsletters, the powers that be have decided that news is next. Strange.

I took a look at this first issue today. "Activate" has an interesting layout, featuring a rundown of the week's top stories, the best in pictures, business and technology sections, a few local news nuggets, and "nearly news" - a selection of weird news bits from around the world. It's pretty much all links, and devoid of much analysis or context, so it reads fairly thin to me.

There are lots of news aggregators out there, this one just seems to be trying to brand itself as the stylish alternative. It's sort of like a brisk little news cocktail for folks who are too busy being painfully hip to do anything so quaintly laborious as actually read a newspaper. The header text on the site asks: "are you on the list for Activate?" a phrase that can't help but pique the interest of its target audience of liggers, blaggers, bloggers and braggers. But, hey, anything that keeps folks informed about the world beyond Hoxton and Williamsburg is a good thing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Looks good, just signed up.