How a regional newspaper can launch an event guide
Seven steps from first meeting to a working what’s-on guide: goals, coverage area, event sources, editorial control, Google, print and making money from it.
· 8 min read
The what’s-on page has been part of the paper for decades, and in print it always worked. Online, at a lot of publishers, it has turned into a calendar someone types twenty listings into on Monday and that is out of date by Thursday.
That’s a waste, because hardly any digital product gets used as regularly. Here is how we’d set up a regional event guide if we were sitting in your newsroom.
1. Decide what the calendar is for
Should it bring new readers in from Google? Bring existing readers back every week, maybe through a newsletter? Or is it mainly about advertisers, the local organisers you don’t currently reach?
Usually it’s a mix, but one of these should lead. It decides which numbers you watch later and where the money goes.
2. Pick your area and categories
Use your circulation area as the boundary. Every town in it gets its own page, because that is what people search for: “concerts in Salzburg”, not “concerts”.
Keep categories few and obvious. Music, stage, family, sport, markets, exhibitions. Twenty finely split categories look good in a planning document and confuse readers and editors alike in practice.
3. Fill the calendar before you launch
The most expensive mistake is a beautiful, empty calendar. Someone who finds nothing on their first visit doesn’t come back, and that first impression is hard to undo.
So plan for several sources. Automatic feeds from event APIs and partner sources supply the bulk without anyone typing. A portal where organisers add their own dates picks up what no feed has: the fire brigade’s summer party, the church jumble sale, the reading at the bookshop. Your newsroom adds tips and previews.
All of it has to end up in one shared dataset with automatic duplicate detection. Otherwise the same concert appears three times, once per source.
4. Stay in control
Your masthead sits above every listing. A review queue where your team approves new entries keeps out spam and embarrassing mistakes. The more of it that’s pre-sorted automatically, inappropriate images for example, the less time it takes.
Plenty of feed entries are just a title, a time and a venue. Automatically written teasers and looked-up details on artists and venues turn them into something people actually want to read, without anyone rewriting them.
5. Think about Google, not your homepage
Most visitors to an events calendar arrive from search, not your homepage. Three things make the difference.
First, your own domain or sub-domain, such as events.your-paper.com, so the rankings are yours. Second, structured data following schema.org (Event) on every event page, which lets your listings appear in Google’s event results. Third, town and category pages for real searches, like “kids’ activities this weekend in [town]”.
The basics we take as given: pages rendered on the server, loading fast, listed in a sitemap that picks up new events by itself.
6. Connect it to what you already have
An article about the new arts centre should point to its next few events. A weekly what’s-on newsletter is one of the easiest ways to keep readers coming back.
And print no longer needs filling by hand. Choose an area, date range and category, export the listings as JSON, XML or CSV, and your layout system turns them into the printed events page.
7. Make money from it
An events calendar creates ad space that fits its content. Organisers pay for featured listings, a local bank sponsors the family section, a bundle combines an online listing, a newsletter slot and a mention in the paper.
It gets really interesting once organisers submit their events to you directly. You then know every organiser in your patch, and your ad sales team has a contact list it could previously only dream of.
Build it or buy it?
You can build all of this yourself. What tends to be underestimated is running it afterwards: feeds change format, duplicates creep in, Google adds requirements. We compared the two routes in more detail in Events calendar: build in-house or white label?
Before you launch, you should be able to tick these off:
- The goal is clear and everyone involved knows it.
- Area and categories are fixed.
- At least one automatic source is connected.
- Someone owns the review queue.
- Your own domain is set up, with structured data.
- Newsletter and print are planned in.
- Ad sales has an offer for organisers.
With wasmachen.at White Label, the feeds, editorial back office and print export are already built in, and you bring the brand. The packages page has the details.