The Star Tribune’s Jon Trevlin writes a FUD-mongering piece on “the City Pages’ parent’s possible merger“. In his first 2 sentences there’s; an ‘if’, a ‘may’, and two ‘mights’.
As a sign of things to come, Rex at MNSpeak pointed me to the online article. I read MNSpeak 2-3 times a day, during my regular NetNewsWire skimming. Don’t remember the last time I picked up a City Pages. I do remember that the last time I did, the entire second half was page after page of phone sex ads. Didn’t inspire me to pick it up again – no matter the investigative cover articles.
We went to a movie this weekend – historically, we would have gone to Citypages.com to check their listings. This time we decided their site was far to difficult to navigate and we hit imdb.com instead. Ended up at the Hopkins $2 theater for the Wedding Crashers. BTW – It’s one of the best movie theater-going experiences I’ve had in a long long time. The staff was friendly, the seats comfortable, the audience quiet, the tickets reasonably priced.
If my current habits are any indication, as long as the City Pages is a printed publication – it doesn’t matter who owns them. As long as they have a printing press, MNSpeak.com will eat their lunch, and review it.
But MNspeak doesn’t have, for example, Rob Nelson – or longer articles in general. That said, I don’t read the print CP either… “Culture to Go” is probably my fave feature, and even then I tend to get there from a MNspeak link.
I’d be curious, as somebody who offered a lot of suggestions to the guys who redesigned the online film listings, why the site is hard to navigate.
Pete, thanks for the note.
The two modes of searching the site supports (by Theater, by Movie) are not how we decide on what to watch.
For us, it’s;
“Let’s go see a movie.”
“What’s playing?”
“I dunno.”
The view that works best for us is – Here’s Everything Playing within 5 Miles of your ZIP Code.
To accomplish this on CityPages.com, I need to individually visit all the theaters I can remember in the area. This takes longer than I have the patience for, so we go to imdb.com (though I still prefer the now extinct Watson)
oh yes, the dollar theater in hopkins is very nice. i hit it on a night they were having a bollywood thing so me and julie were impressed by the busloads (literally) for bollywood. you forgot to mention (staff is friendly, seats are indeed comfortable, price is certainly right) but wedding crashers, the movie, blows. barely worth the gas money (or bus fare).
After reading your comments on citypages and MNspeak it sounds to me that what both of you are looking for is at ‘sotanlife.com’ We have an extremely usable database that allows users to narrow there search using a variety of search criteria. We also provide many interesting editorails and articles that aren’t hidden within sex phone ads.