Anyone following CityBeat during the past year has seen our publication undergo several major changes, including a redesign of the print edition, the re-implementation of a stand-alone cover story and an expansion of the news and opinion sections. We also added TV and sports columns, refreshed our weekly event and music pick formats and created the staff column you’re reading right now so our writers can take a break from their regular beats and get yelled at by an entirely new audience once in a while. Next month we’re expanding our dining section, and there’s more new stuff to come after that.
The same can’t be said for Metromix, which on Sept. 19 will be delivered to its purple boxes for the final time. The news isn’t much of a surprise — Gannett, which owns The Enquirer, has been closing its Metromix-style publications in markets all over the country during the past couple years. Cincinnati’s was one of the final ones to go, and while we at CityBeat don’t like to see print publications fail, the closing of Metromix is kind of a win for us.
Gannett first introduced its weekly publication in Cincinnati in 2003, then called CiN Weekly. The paper focused on entertainment — it covered no news or politics — and ran fluffy features on restaurants, bars and events, preferring gratuitous promotion to opinion or criticism. CiN Weekly was what CityBeat would be like if we let our writers file stories after taking more than their daily allotment of Xanax: “Café Offers Good Food, Cool Paint on the Walls.”
The decision to publish an entertainment weekly was largely seen as an attempt by Gannett to take marketshare from altweeklies like CityBeat and similar papers in other cities. In non-industry speak, Gannett was trying to kill us. The resources at hand made CiN Weekly seem formidable, if knockoff-ish, from the start.
“One day you came outside and there were just purple boxes everywhere,” CityBeat Publisher Dan Bockrath told me the other day. “They were on all four corners of the street downtown.”
Bockrath met with publishers of altweeklies in other cities like Indianapolis and Louisville to discuss strategies for competing with such a well-funded opponent. CityBeat increased its circulation and launched a marketing campaign aimed at articulating the difference between news and entertainment.
CiN Weekly started off OK: It had personality — and a local staff — and eventually the average person couldn’t really tell the difference between CiN Weekly and CityBeat. CiN Weekly was brightly designed, entertainment- and event-based and had pictures of its young staff next to silly answers to arbitrary questions on its opening page every week. It was harmless, wholesome fun targeting adults in their twenties and thirties.
But when Gannett felt the pain of the Great Newspaper Depression of the late 2000s, CiN Weekly got the ax. Gannett in 2007 had partnered with the Tribune Co. on the Metromix network of local entertainment websites, and in 2009 the company changed CiN Weekly to Metromix and laid off most of its staff. It’s been a drier version of a fairly bland publication ever since.
It’s not easy to be a profitable print newspaper these days — CityBeat knows that as much as anyone. During the late 2000s we made changes, too, reducing our page count and cutting costs as much as we could. No one had any money for print ads during the recession, then Craigslist gave away a bunch of shit for free and Facebook started telling everyone what was going on in town whether they wanted to know or not.
But when it comes down to it, newspapers succeed because they provide an essential public service and are a credible source of information — if they’re entertaining and funny, even better. Gannett learned the hard way that you can’t just print something that looks like a newspaper and expect people to read it.
Metromix was doomed to fail because it wasn’t a real newspaper and the people who made it post-CiN Weekly weren’t engaged in Cincinnati’s relevant cultural happenings. Gannett sacrificed its local identity for cheap, reusable content and an impermeable blandness that eventually ruined it. The same thing could be said for The Enquirer’s pending format changes and online paywall, but that’s a story for another day.
Metromix is gone, and it’s not really a good or bad thing. We hope you’ll keep paying attention to what we’re doing at our real newspaper, because we’re the ones who went into the recession with an actual purpose and came out the other side with our identity intact.
And if you really miss those cool headshots, email Mike Breen — he really wants us to start doing that.
EMAIL IDEAS FOR QUIRKY STAFF QUESTIONS TO: dcross@citybeat.com
The same can’t be said for Metromix, which on Sept. 19 will be delivered to its purple boxes for the final time. The news isn’t much of a surprise — Gannett, which owns The Enquirer, has been closing its Metromix-style publications in markets all over the country during the past couple years. Cincinnati’s was one of the final ones to go, and while we at CityBeat don’t like to see print publications fail, the closing of Metromix is kind of a win for us.
Gannett first introduced its weekly publication in Cincinnati in 2003, then called CiN Weekly. The paper focused on entertainment — it covered no news or politics — and ran fluffy features on restaurants, bars and events, preferring gratuitous promotion to opinion or criticism. CiN Weekly was what CityBeat would be like if we let our writers file stories after taking more than their daily allotment of Xanax: “Café Offers Good Food, Cool Paint on the Walls.”
The decision to publish an entertainment weekly was largely seen as an attempt by Gannett to take marketshare from altweeklies like CityBeat and similar papers in other cities. In non-industry speak, Gannett was trying to kill us. The resources at hand made CiN Weekly seem formidable, if knockoff-ish, from the start.
“One day you came outside and there were just purple boxes everywhere,” CityBeat Publisher Dan Bockrath told me the other day. “They were on all four corners of the street downtown.”
Bockrath met with publishers of altweeklies in other cities like Indianapolis and Louisville to discuss strategies for competing with such a well-funded opponent. CityBeat increased its circulation and launched a marketing campaign aimed at articulating the difference between news and entertainment.
CiN Weekly started off OK: It had personality — and a local staff — and eventually the average person couldn’t really tell the difference between CiN Weekly and CityBeat. CiN Weekly was brightly designed, entertainment- and event-based and had pictures of its young staff next to silly answers to arbitrary questions on its opening page every week. It was harmless, wholesome fun targeting adults in their twenties and thirties.
But when Gannett felt the pain of the Great Newspaper Depression of the late 2000s, CiN Weekly got the ax. Gannett in 2007 had partnered with the Tribune Co. on the Metromix network of local entertainment websites, and in 2009 the company changed CiN Weekly to Metromix and laid off most of its staff. It’s been a drier version of a fairly bland publication ever since.
It’s not easy to be a profitable print newspaper these days — CityBeat knows that as much as anyone. During the late 2000s we made changes, too, reducing our page count and cutting costs as much as we could. No one had any money for print ads during the recession, then Craigslist gave away a bunch of shit for free and Facebook started telling everyone what was going on in town whether they wanted to know or not.
But when it comes down to it, newspapers succeed because they provide an essential public service and are a credible source of information — if they’re entertaining and funny, even better. Gannett learned the hard way that you can’t just print something that looks like a newspaper and expect people to read it.
Metromix was doomed to fail because it wasn’t a real newspaper and the people who made it post-CiN Weekly weren’t engaged in Cincinnati’s relevant cultural happenings. Gannett sacrificed its local identity for cheap, reusable content and an impermeable blandness that eventually ruined it. The same thing could be said for The Enquirer’s pending format changes and online paywall, but that’s a story for another day.
Metromix is gone, and it’s not really a good or bad thing. We hope you’ll keep paying attention to what we’re doing at our real newspaper, because we’re the ones who went into the recession with an actual purpose and came out the other side with our identity intact.
And if you really miss those cool headshots, email Mike Breen — he really wants us to start doing that.
EMAIL IDEAS FOR QUIRKY STAFF QUESTIONS TO: dcross@citybeat.com
good riddance to bad rubbish....wonder if Gannett has learned the lesson....
From somebody who knows, Gannett never learns a lesson.