Carried townspeople

It seems that in every big city there is already or will soon be its own “big city” or The Village. Colta.ru asked enthusiasts of new city media from Barnaul, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Tomsk, Tyumen to tell how this is done with them.

Dmitry Korzev, founder

- How and when your publication arose? Have you focused on any media when you came up with it?

- It's My City appeared four years ago. Of course, we were inspired by the capital's examples - “posters”, The Village , “Big City”. In Yekaterinburg there was no publication for advanced youth, conditional hipsters, and we wanted to make some kind of media at the junction of city and youth publications. It turned out such a hybrid. Now he has shifted to the side of the city media telling about people, places, projects, and environment. But the main audience is youth.

- What means do you exist for?

- Due to the sale of advertising. We have a small audience (5-7, rarely 10 thousand unique per day), so it’s difficult for us to sell media advertising. So we are trying to do native projects, and this is more or less. Sometimes it turns out that we are something like a small creative agency with our small media: we come up with advertising projects, make them, publish them, we promote in social networks. However, the money is still not enough, and it is very difficult to develop.

- How would you determine your publication? What do you see your main task - or, if you like, a mission?

- The publication for caring citizens. First of all, his mission is to formulate the requirements of the development of the city, to talk about changes in the city and city life. We also study the history of the city, talk about inspiring examples of civil behavior, look for interesting businesses and ideas. In addition, IMC has a recreational function: we do not write about crime and politics, so many readers come to us to take a break from these topics. We are such a media lounge zone, information chillout.

- Who makes the publication? Do you have a big edition?

- We have a small edition: three people in the state, a couple more constantly helps, but does not consist in the state. And the bullet of freelance authors is quite large, many city journalists and just caring townspeople write to us. We can say that in a sense we have user Generated Content , but edited (and often paid). There are a lot of freelays - more or less constantly writes, I think a person is 15-20.

- For whom are you doing all this? Who is your reader?

- First of all, a resident of Yekaterinburg. Presumably he is from 18 to 35, but we like that we have older readers. He loves his city, most likely, does not want to leave it, so he is very interested in its development. He is quite active and if he does not engage in any creative projects himself, then at least he sympathizes with them. We would like to maintain this emotion in people, to promote creation, for example, the development of a responsible small business. We are also read by people who left Yekaterinburg and living in other cities, but monitor the life of a small homeland. Yekaterinburg has such an interesting quality: those who have left rarely break with him forever.

- And who are your main competitors?

- For advertisers, we have to compete with large city portals like E1. R U , 66. R U , which is very inconvenient, since we have a dozens of attendance ten times (and the prices for advertising publications are not in tens). We try to explain that we are not about quantity, but about the quality of advertising texts and audiences.

As for competition for readers, that is, the EKBurg site similar in approaches. T V (but he is an application to the cable television channel), there is a site “Moments”, but it is more about lifstail and entertainment.

- What are your relations with the city authorities? Do you have any friction?

- Absolutely neutral relations. We do not climb into politics, so we are almost uninteresting to the city authorities. We have good relations with the chief architect of the city Timur Abdullaev, we are very lucky, we have an architect literally from the target audience of IMC - young, indifferent, worried about the development of the city. Therefore, we easily found a common language and try to help each other. He is like an expert for us, we - attracting the attention of the audience to different projects of the lead -headed. This is organic and natural cooperation, there is no money in it.

-Do you touch on any acute-social topics in your publication?

- We rarely write about suffering, misfortunes, death, and social problems are associated with such things. Someone can say that on our website the world of pink unicorns, where people do not get sick and do not die, but only open coffee houses and barbershopes. But this is normal, we are still a niche media and do not set ourselves the task of drawing a complete picture of the world. Although now I answered your question and thought that it may be time to add problematic topics to IMC : after all, the audience that was formed four years ago has clearly grown up and is ready for more serious topics.