Site Surgically Removes Original Content And Replaces It With Warmed-over Rubbish
Citysearch Atlanta laid off it’s only Atlanta based full time editorial employee yesterday leaving a headless body lurching through the city streets.
Details are sketchy, but our understanding is that Citysearch will aggregate content from sister sites to include Urbanspoon eliminating the need for local editors.
But what does this mean? We think it means a whole lot of re-hash. Hello, if I want to read a review on Urbanspoon, I’ll go to Urbanspoon, not Citysearch thank you very much.
Kara Nortman, Senior Vice President of Publishing for CityGrid Media who owns Citysearch says, “As part of our evolution to CityGrid, we’re moving to a more automated experience on Citysearch.”
We have extreme doubts that Citysearch can create the local flavor provided by a true city insider without the insider. Clearly they’ve done this for business reasons.
As one source puts it, Citysearch is on its way to becoming the Yellow Pages of restaurants online.
The real shame to this story, however, is that one of Atlanta’s greatest personalities, Jonathan baker, was days away from celebrating his third year with the company as City Editor just before being laid off.
“Citysearch needed to move in a different direction, and in all honestly, I’m surprised it took them this long to make the move,” said Baker.
“If Citysearch is going the way of more aggregated content, it didn’t make much sense to have us around. We were just extra weight at that point.”
Luckily for Atlanta, Baker will be launching SimpleClassicLiving.com (@ClassicLiving).
Said Baker, “I want Simple Classic Living to be an observational guide to simple, understated style. A place where people can not only get good advice on classic ways to eat, drink, consume and travel but also a site that encourages greatest generation-style American values.”
Baker tells us that Simple Classic Living will be an observational guide to things he finds tasteful.
We love his insights on things that are not tasteful such as, “blue tooth headsets, fantasy sports, chain restaurants, 32 ounce sodas (when an 8 ounce bottle does the job) and playing Guitar Hero when you can play a real Guitar”
And that’s why we love Jonathan and wish him the best. Baker hopes to have Simple Classic Living fully up and running within the next few weeks so in the interim, keep up with Jonathan Baker:
[email protected]
www.simpleclassicliving.com
www.twitter.com/classicliving
2 Responses
Good news, in the end. Citysearch was using maybe a tenth of that kid’s talents, and that’s being generous to them. Their main problem is that you never find what you were looking for on their site unless you did a specific site search on google.
In response to this:
“We have extreme doubts that Citysearch can create the local flavor provided by a true city insider without the insider.”
Scouts that posted content for Citysearch, posted content about the city where they lived. So for instance, the scouts that lived and worked in Atlanta for Citysearch, would have their content moved to the Atlanta Urbanspoon.