So, MNspeak is no longer. We already new something was up at The Rake when it went online-only earlier this year.
The newly-debuted SecretsOfTheCity.com purports to combine the best of both those worlds to be “an essential daily digest of Twin Cities culture.”
Matt Bartel offered me a sneak peek last week. From a visual standpoint, it looks good. It’s magazine-y. It’s pretty clean. It’s pretty easy to navigate. The Rake has always had pretty good content and the biggest problem I had with it before was that it was too much for me to consume it all.
What used to be MNspeak is now the “Today’s Talk” section of SOTC. All the archives and comments and everything are still there. Your same rakemag.com or mnspeak.com login will work there, as the “welcome to the new joint” post explains. For the MNspeak regulars I really think the change is minimal and once your eyeballs adjust and your brain gets comfy in the new decor, it might actually be easier.
I surmised there were three reasons why Matt was making this change.
- The Rake needed further pruning.
- MNspeak despearately needed a hefty backend upgrade. (They switched from Cold Fusion to Drupal.)
- One site is easier to run than two.
I’m not privvy to the financials of it all, but Matt confirmed that those three reasons played a part. So I get it, from that standpoint.
So it shouldn’t — in theory — matter that the MNspeak brand has been kicked to the curb. Everybody off the ledge. It’s the regular commentors that make it what it is. I’m no branding expert by any stretch, but I will say that I think the edgy, hip (ugh, I know, I couldn’t come up with a better word), in-the-know feel it had before might be gone.
People with faster fingers than I have already pounced on the subject. Notably, David Brauer on the BrauBlog at MinnPost (the only media critic I’ve ever enjoyed reading) and Paul Schmelzer at MnIndy. The response, in those posts and on Twitter, seems to be a universal questioning of the wisdom of the killing of the MNspeak brand combined with a wait-and-see cautious optimism.
I think it looks good and it makes sense. Do I like the change? I don’t know yet.
8 Comments
I’m a little unsure about the ditching of both the Rake and MNSpeak brands, but I’ll be interested to see how it all plays out.
I am offering the term “SOC Puppets” to replace MNspeakers.
SOC Puppets. Heh!
I’m kind of enjoying watching everyone going through the stages of grief in the comments. The snark is coming back; that’s a good sign.
Not a fan. No, not a fan at all.
Just seems like a stupid thing to do, ditching two established local brands, designing it to look like it was made ten years ago, and then telling your audience, who has to relearn how to use your entire site(s), that these are all “improvements” instead of labeling them correctly as the huge nuisances they are. All of these changes seem to have been made for the company, forgoing and ignoring the most important—pretty much the only—part of web design: the end-user.
The creators’ and designers’ contempt for their visitors instills in me a similar contempt for them.
Todd, change is inevitable in life. Yes, it’s disorienting at first but, y’know, it starts looking more familiar after a short while and feeling more comfortable.
Yeah… I guess it can stay.
Notice they’ve made a number of changes since the site went up, including putting the entire site on a dark-grey ground. A huge improvement from floating in a white void.
Whoa! That dark-grey background is new as of some time this afternoon.
Yeah, lots of tweaks. They’ve been pretty responsive to feedback on a number of things.
Still don’t know about the move as a whole, but at least the site itself looks better than it did on Monday.