Time Out brings entertainment guide here
Publication will focus on restaurants as well as the city’s cultural goings-on
Time Out is coming to Montreal to launch an online and print publication.
Time Out, which has alternative culture and entertainment guides in cities around the world, will be coming into the Montreal market near the end of 2018 with what a company spokesperson is calling a soft launch, meaning a low-key start. It will be only in French to begin but English content will eventually be added.
Like all of the Time Out publications, Time Out Montreal will focus on providing information for readers about what’s going on here culturally and look at the city’s best restaurants. In an email, the Time Out spokesperson wrote: “Time Out Montreal will not be different from Time Out around the world: Time Out is about inspiring and enabling people to make the most of the city with unique content, curated by expert journalists — this is at the heart of everything we do around the world whether that’s London, New York or Paris and will be at the heart of everything we will do in Montreal, too. We write about the best things to do, food and drink, art and culture ...”
It’s good news for Montrealers thirsty for information about their city, something they used to get from the city’s four alt weeklies, the Montreal Mirror, Hour, Voir and Ici. All four are gone, though Voir still exists as a glossy monthly. There is still an online cultural guide, Cult MTL.
News of the Time Out launch leaked when people saw a notice on LinkedIn announcing Time Out was looking for an editor of Time Out Montreal. The notice stated, in part: “The position will involve launching Time Out Montreal in print and rapidly growing the publication’s online audience. This person is responsible for making sure that Time Out Montreal meets their planned goals and targets and are also responsible for helping to increase awareness of the Time Out brand, both in the real world and in print and online.”
It was announced earlier this year that Time Out would be launching Time Out Market Montreal in late 2019 in the newly renovated Eaton Centre. According to Time Out, this “will bring the best of the city together under one roof: the city’s best restaurants, bars and cultural experiences — based on the editorial curation Time Out has always been known for.”
Ivanhoé Cambridge, which owns the Eaton Centre, has said Time Out Market Montreal “will include a curated mix of 16 food offerings, two bars, a demo kitchen, a cooking academy, a retail shop and a cultural stage.” Ivanhoé Cambridge is in the midst of a $200-million renovation project at the Eaton Centre, which is expected to be completed by late 2019.
I think Time Out will work ici. When Québecor pulled the plug on the Montreal Mirror in 2012, I wrote a column suggesting the huge media corporation had not given the alternative weekly a proper shot at survival and I said, and I quote, “there’s a great opportunity out there for someone to jump into the void and do something here. Just like there was back in ’85 when a bunch of disgruntled, dysfunctional would-be journalists — including yours truly — realized there was room for an alternative voice to the one paper in town at the time.”
We started up the Mirror all those years ago because we knew people here in this oh-so-cultural city were hungry to know what cool bands were playing in which cool clubs, to find out what the hippest new restos were and just to have a paper that would let them know how to spend the weekend.
But the new twist with Time Out is that it’ll be bilingual, something most media companies here have shied away from. I have a hunch in this post- Sugar Sammy universe we’re living in, bilingual might just be the way togo.