Let's do launch: New Manchester websites

The past few weeks have seen the launch of three long-anticipated sites that all aim to shake up the way Manchester's cultural life is represented online. I have written something for all of them, so I'm not exactly impartial or anything. But I think each has a lot to offer in its own way.

Following the formal lifting of election purdah (such a funny idea, that) first out of the starting gate was Visit Manchester with a bold approach that sets out a new model for city tourism websites. Built by magneticNorth, it's a dramatically different user experience, with continuous scrolling, invisible navigation and an open-door approach to content.

It would be fair to say that it has divided the city's digital folk. For my part, I'm a fan of the site's design. Of course, it has bugs that need to be worked out over time. I really love that they have incorporated so much social media content, and though its nigh-on impossible to ensure that only relevant tweets/photos end up there, VM is to be commended for relinquishing absolute control of what people say about Manchester on their own site. I wrote a little rundown of the city's cheap eats options for VM, and I'm happy that they used other bloggers' writing as well - hope that continues.

Next up was Creative Times, with a re-launch of the regional creative industry news site/print newsletter formerly run by the sadly-departed CIDS. Creative Times has been reborn in online-only format as a joint venture between The White Room consultancy, Cornerhouse and Fudge in Bolton. Edited by former Metro editor Chris Sharatt, the site looks good and has some interesting features (as well as a good amount of original multimedia content.)

It will be interesting to see how exactly it carves out its own identity alongside sites like How-Do and Creative Tourist that weren't around during its last incarnation; participation from the creative community will be key to its success. And if anyone was interested in the Manchester blog aggregator project I first posted about here a while back, you can read a bit more about it in my Creative Thinking column: Are blogs the future for arts coverage? (though I should point out that the aggregator we're working on won't just feature arts blogs, it'll have Manchester blogs on every subject.)

Finally, fresh out today is Go See This, the new what's on website from All About Audiences (them that used to be Arts About Manchester, who took on a new name following their designation as the regional audience development body in the NW). Now, I did quite a bit of work helping Editor Adam Comstive develop the content side of things, so there's no way I can even pretend to judge it in a disinterested way. It's a place where you can find out what's happening in the city's arts and cultural venues, plan outings, book tickets and get involved in a conversation about the arts in Manchester. We have needed something like this for, oh, about as long as I can remember, and I hope that it will prove extremely useful to anyone who wants to know what's happening in Manctown.

Also want to point you in the direction of the excellent Manchester Scenewipe, a smorgasboard of video from Manchester-based bands, and This is The Now, also from Visit Manchester but focusing solely on promoting live music in the city. It looks very nice indeed, but hope that content is going to keep getting updated as most of the stuff on the mainpage happened back in May.

Leftovers

A few interesting odds and ends:

Some Manchester writers have cooked up a tasty new web-based venture over at 'other' magazine. You can read new writing from various people, admire Nicholas Royle's 20-year-old collection of bread tags, and an annotated diagram of Socrates Adams-Florou's fridge (above). Plus, they're on Twitter. And this post about the absence of a UK independent lit scene has attracted 86 comments!

Not Manchester-based, but interesting all the same. The Literary Platform is a new website showcasing projects involving literature and technology. So if you like what we do over at Rainy City Stories, you might enjoy a browse.

TBA Magazine looks to be a new art webzine based in Manchester. Lovely website and some good lookin' content on there. No word on when issue 1 will be launching - will update this post when I have more info.

And I enjoyed the maiden issue of Things Happen, a fanzine about our fair city from the Manchester Municipal Design Corporation, a subsidiary group of MMU's DesignLab. Website coming soon and a second issue planned for this summer, if they can find a way to pick up the tab. You can find it at FutureEverything events.

Manchester magazines, online and off

Here's a long overdue roundup of new activity in Manchester's cultural media landscape. Some gigantic web launches lurk in the wings, but at the moment there' s some evidence that, at least on the smaller and more grassroots side of things, print is not entirely dead here.

There's encouraging action on the zine front. I should have heard about this one ages ago, as it's already pretty well established, but Pull Yourself Together is a music zine dedicated to the indiepop scene that's published every two months. They also have a nice sideline in gigs, and clubnights at Common. And they now have a web presence over here. Also in the zine and music business is Moon Printed Shadows, which is shortly launching a publication called Knick Knack featuring poetry and short stories from Manchester writers.

I got a chance to peruse the Salford Zine Library at Islington Mill the other day - some real gems in there, and its good to see someone taking responsibility for collecting and championing zines. If you make a zine, get in touch and send them a donation. They also have what appears to be every single edition of the long-departed City Life over there. That made for some pretty interesting reading.

In case anyone missed it, Words & Fixtures published an excellent list of Manchester magazines, fanzines and online publications that are open for creative writing submissions, as well as writers' groups - incredibly useful info for writers in our fair city.

Copywriter Tom Mason, who was responsible for November in Manchester, has a new web-based publishing project: 330 words "The concept behind 330 Words is simple. Take a photograph and let it inspire you towards a piece of fiction. Let your photograph form the foundation of your story. Choose your own genre and style. Keep the entire thing under 330 words." (Auto) Flash fiction?

Not to be confused with the previous, 3030 Magazine describes itself as "articles, reviews and stories aiming to get people in Manchester interacting. Fans of old-style documentation - written on paper. Free press out in early 2010." No information on when/where/how it is launching, though going by their Twitter activity they seem to be collecting submissions and doing a spot of matchmaking.

Now Then, the Sheffield arts and culture print magazine that planned to launch a Manchester edition this month has postponed the launch and will take a few months to regroup: "It is with sincere regret we write to inform you that, despite our best efforts, we have been unable to gather enough support from independent retailers, charities and community groups to print an edition of Now Then Manchester this month," they wrote on their blog today.

"This is not us giving up, but a postponement in order to create something which is sustainable on a monthly basis. We are all still hugely committed to seeing a magazine on the streets and in the cafes of Manchester, and to the task of informing people about their local independent artists, traders and politics," they say. They'll continue to publish content on the blog in the intervening period (props for including the word bombinated in their recent Magnetic Fields review.)

The Skinny, the Glasgow listings magazine that was planning a Manchester edition, has now reportedly shelved those plans. They started posting a bit of MCR content online, but stopped short of launching a print mag. Just like Time Out. That's right, we got stood up again. (sniff.) Come on, what's wrong with us? We deserve a what's on magazine just as much as anyone else does, dammit. Is it something we said?

Or is it the fact that everyone seems convinced that there isn't the local advertising market to support a print magazine in Manchester, to say nothing of the fact that we're in a recession, or that the entire model of financing print journalism by selling ads is crumbling before our eyes.

Oh yeah, well, okay. There is that.

(Illustration from Toothpaste for Dinner)

Rainy City Stories

I'm really delighted to announce the launch of a project that Chris (Mancubist) and I have been cooking up on the sly for some time now:

Rainy City Stories is a website that publishes new writing set in Manchester. It uses a Google map of the city to organise stories or poetry linked to particular places. Readers can click on a place marked by the little cloud icon to read a piece of writing associated with that spot.

Who can write for this site? Anybody can. We're open to all submissions of unpublished work. To get things rolling, we've commissioned pieces from four outstanding Mancunian writers: Jackie Kay, Mike Duff, Nicholas Royle and Rajeev Balasubramanyam. They're up now - go take a look.

But now we want YOU to send us your stories, poems or bits of memoir. If we like them, we'll put them on the map.

We've got big plans for the future, too.

We'll be publishing more commissioned writing in 2009, and expanding our site to include photography, graphics, and audio and video readings to accompany the words. A series of related writing workshops and a live literature event featuring some of the Rainy City Stories writers will be part of the 2009 Manchester Literature Festival. And we're investigating a fantastically exciting new possibility that would involve some of the best writing from the website, but we can't say much more about that yet.

Erm, what else should we tell you? The project is part of the Manchester Literature Festival's Freeplay programme, and it's funded by the good people of Arts Council England. Chris designed the site on Wordpress and is in charge of the techy stuff. I'll be doing the editing. No ferrets were harmed in the making of this website.

I'd love to hear what people think about the site so far - if you have some thoughts, leave a comment or email me at themanchizzle AT gmail DOT com.

The Manchester Review launches

It's always good to see a new literary journal starting up, but to my mind this one couldn't be more exciting. The University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing this week launches The Manchester Review, edited by the Centre's co-directors John McAuliffe and Ian McGuire. Most intriguingly, "it will depart from the medium’s conventions by existing only online, with new issues appearing each spring and autumn. These will often include broadcasts of new music, public debates and video pieces, as well as visual art, fiction and poetry."

The first issue is up now, with work from the likes of Paul Muldoon, Ali Smith, John Banville, Matt Welton and Chris Killen. Some more about the publication, from its website:

“The Manchester Review takes its cue from their proactive promotion of new writing, but uses online media to show and sponsor the interplay of poetry, fiction, music, visual art and essays by new and established practitioners. We hope that it will find new readers and audiences for exciting and innovative creative work, which is steeped in traditional virtues.

“This will be accompanied by the Review’s lively critical blog, which will take the temperature of - and maybe sometimes set the agenda for – the contemporary arts in the UK and beyond.”

Manchester is becoming quite the place for online literary endeavour. It seems like every week or so I add another couple of lit bloggers to the blogroll. We're blessed the with Literature Festival's geek-friendly Freeplay programme, and blogtastic live lit nights like no point in not being friends, with its tech-aided readings, Facebook group and antics on youtube. Even more traditional publishers and publications like Comma Press and Transmission are increasingly doing stuff online.

And new paper publications all seem to all have blogs, often as their main web presence. One such is the lovely Wufniks, started by students at the aforementioned writing school, with a fantastic tagline: "a mishegoss of shiny new words."

Time Out Manchester... it's alive?!?

Missed this little piece on Time Out Manchester from way back in July on How Do. Not much information in it, but the folks in London are saying the project isn't dead, and the TOM website has been updated with a wee bit of content. So I'll certainly let you know if I hear anything more than this. But I suspect there are some among this blog's readers who actually do know something more than this. Ahem. Hello?

Incidentally, if you scroll down to the comments on that How-Do article there's a cringe-inducing catfight between two local media folk that makes for pretty funny reading.

How-Do? How-Don't!

After a reading a few interesting features on new NW media site How-Do (buried in among reams of head-poundingly dull pr babble) I was unpleasantly surprised by this week's edition of "The Weekly Wrap", their e-newsletter. Guest editor Paul Carroll writes:

"I bet there’s not been an agency presentation made this week that didn’t propose ‘doing a blog’ for client X, Y or Z. But are blogs really the future of ‘citizen journalism’ or just a load of egotistical, boring claptrap? Venturing onto How-Do’s blog section, there’s over 50 links to entice the visitor. Who has the time to read them? Who, in fact, has the time to write them? Worse of all are the so-called blogs that are thinly veiled corporate vehicles, whose attempts at being ‘street’ are as cool as the Concert for Diana. There are some good, amusing and thought provoking blogs out there (including some notable ones in the How-Do list), but these are the exception rather than the rule. My advice to most would-be bloggers? Shut it!"

And that's exactly what i did... with the email. If How-Do wanted to make it clear that they represent the backwards-looking, tin-eared, grammatically-challenged old boys of the North West media, they've succeeded by enabling this rubbish.

I'm the first one to agree that thinly-veiled corporate vehicle blogs (or, as I like to call them, "flogs") are evil - and there's an interesting and timely piece to be written there, as many web-users still seem blithely unaware of the mercenary element lurking on blogs, messageboards and social networking platforms. Though, as long as they're up-front about their identity, company blogs can be great reads and very effective in many ways. But any interest I had in his line of thought disappeared when Carroll conflated it with the old saw about all blogs being "egotistical, boring claptrap." We've all heard this argument (expressed more intelligently) before, and it was wrong then. Now it's five years out of date, badly written, and still wrong. Nice one.

Of course, I'm sure all concerned will read even this negative bandwidth as buzz for their respective brands. No publicity is bad publicity, after all! Just keep saying that, guys.

Time Out Manchester update

Yet another installment in the laborious will-they-or-won't-they saga of Time Out's much anticipated Manchester launch.

In an interview on brand new NW Media networking website How-Do, Tony Elliott declares that the magazine will start in October, following the launch of a beefed-up TOM Website. It should definitely launch by the middle of October, he says ... unless it takes longer to set things up, that is, but certainly we can look for a launch no later than the beginning of next year.

Uh huh.

There are some more interesting bits in the interview, like the part where Tony says he's "fairly confident" the magazine can shift 8,000-9,000 copies every week. And, yes, it's a video interview delivered via YouTube. Pretty spiffy, no?

But the best part of this interview is down in the comments, where two competing magazine editors have written little love notes purporting to wish Tony good luck on the Manchester launch that are actually wince-inducing, thinly-veiled shills for their own unimpressive mags, 69 and (my favourite) Moving Manchester. What a couple of palookas.

If you're wondering where How-Do came from, it's the brainchild of Nick Jaspen formerly of the NW Enquirer. It "offers news, opinion and resources for those working in all aspects of media in the region." It looks promising so far.

Other interesting bits include a piece on Manchester Confidential, complete with an amusing description of the advertorial site's restaurant "review" process, and a comments spat... already! And we notice they have very good taste in blogs, too.

(Thanks to Mind for the Time Out tip-off)

TO DO: Blog workshop, My Manchester, HK art

Lots of other folks have blogged about this, but I thought I'd remind you, too. Thursday at 6pm the lovely people from the BBC Manchester Blog are holding a workshop on blogging. It's a free (you need to register) two-hour intro for anyone who's ever wanted to blog but hasn't yet, and will also benefit experienced bloggers who have questions about stuff like RSS feeds, changing platforms or installing advertising. And anyone who's remotely interested in getting involved in the BBC Manchester Blog should come along.

Incidentally, I'm going to be on BBC Radio Manchester chatting about Manc blogs again this week - should go out around 3 or half 3 Wednesday.

I found this listings site for the city, called My Manchester. A smattering of art exhibition listings, gigs etc. but the all-in-one place film listings are probably the most useful bit. However, it doesn't stretch to Bolton and some other outlying urbs in Greater Manc.

There are a couple of Asian-flavoured art exhibitions opening Thursday. Collective Identity is a group show examining the Chinese people under Mao at the Chinese Art Centre. Arrivals and Departures: New Art Perspectives of Hong Kong is at Urbis, and features the work of Castlefield Gallery co-directors Kwong Lee and Yuen Fong Ling, among others (the above image is from Gordon Cheung).

The exhibition marks the 10-year anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong, and I'm looking forward to checking it out. The last time I was in Hong Kong was before it reverted to Chinese control. I stayed here and it scared the bejeezus out of me. That was before I had seen Chungking Express though - a marvelous movie.