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MEN to relaunch City Life as its standalone entertainments website

Posted: 01/05/08 By: Oliver Luft
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Manchester Evening News Media is relaunching its City Life entertainments magazine as a standalone website.

Since folding publication of the paid-for weekly edition of City Life more than two years ago, MEN has been giving the magazine away as a supplement with the Friday edition of its Evening News paper.

Developers say the new website will become the home online for all entertainment and leisure content produced across MEN’s daily and weekly newspaper and TV brands in the city.

"There is still considerable brand equity for City Life you can't go in any local pub without seeing posters or reviews from the old magazine, it isn't just a case of relaunching the brand, the brand is still in existence," Matthew Davies, product manager for City Life, told Journalism.co.uk

"Our Friday supplement given out with the MEN is still City Life, we have a City Life entertainments programme on Channel M as well. The brand is still there, we're just creating the online platform to tie it all together."

A specific date for rollout of the new site is not yet set. However, developers are working towards an autumn launch.

The new site will have a heavy mix of multimedia content supplied by MEN's daily and weekly newspapers and its Channel M television station.

The launch version will give users the opportunity to interact around content supplied from MEN, Davies said, allowing them to offer their own ratings and reviews.

This will be augmented by later development of more user-centric features, he added, aimed at reaching a younger audience on social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, and engaging them on those platforms as well as on the new site.

"In entertainments we can't grow if it's a monologue and not a dialogue, so there will be numerous opportunities for users to contribute, spaces where they can create and where they have control as well," Davies added.

"It's definitely not going to be about us telling people what's going on, although there will be an element of that, it will be about letting the users define what they'd like to do as well."

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