Most “what’s on” sections at media sites are quietly broken. Not in the technical sense — the page loads, the listings render, the widget works. Broken in the editorial sense: they show readers a small, lopsided slice of what’s actually happening in the city, and they call it the events page.

The cause is almost always the same. Somewhere along the way, the publisher decided that “events” meant “things sold through ticketing platforms,” wired up a feed from Ticketmaster or a local equivalent, and shipped it. That feed is what readers see when they click “Events” in the nav.

Here’s the problem: fewer than one in five events in any given city sells tickets through a major platform. The rest — the overwhelming majority of the actual cultural life of the place — is invisible to your page.

What a ticketing-only listing actually shows

Concerts, mostly. Some comedy. The occasional theatre run. Touring acts coming through the bigger venues.

That’s a real category, and it matters. But it’s the corner of the events landscape with the lowest frequency (these shows are rare relative to everything else), the highest price point (filtering out a huge segment of readers), and the strongest pre-existing awareness (the people going to that arena show already knew about it from Spotify, the radio, or the band’s own marketing).

In other words: the events your widget shows are exactly the events your readers least need you to surface. They were going to find out about Coldplay anyway.

What’s missing from a ticketing-only listing

Here’s a partial inventory of what doesn’t appear in a typical ticketing feed:

  • Community center events — open mic nights, language exchanges, knitting circles, board game evenings, parent-and-baby groups
  • Church and religious events — choir performances, organ recitals, advent concerts, holiday services that draw cross-denominational crowds
  • Library programming — author readings, book launches, kids’ story hours, lecture series, language classes
  • Museum and gallery openings — the small ones, the artist-run spaces, the one-night-only exhibitions
  • University and school events — student recitals, graduation showcases, public lectures, alumni events
  • Sports and recreation — local league matches, running clubs, parkrun, amateur tournaments, hockey practice that families attend
  • Markets — farmers’ markets, flea markets, seasonal craft fairs, holiday markets
  • Civic events — town halls, council meetings open to the public, public consultations, festivals organised by the city
  • Restaurant and bar events — tasting menus, brewery tours, wine evenings, trivia nights, live DJ sessions
  • Festivals and street events — neighbourhood festivals, parades, food festivals, cultural week celebrations
  • Workshops and classes — pottery, painting, dance, cooking, repair cafés, craft circles

None of these go through a ticketing platform. Most are free or pay-at-the-door. Many are run by people who would never call themselves “promoters” — they’re a librarian, a vicar, a teacher, the manager of the local community centre, a volunteer at the running club. They’re putting on hundreds of events a week, collectively, and they’re invisible to your events page.

This is the actual cultural life of the place you cover. And your readers know it’s happening, even if your site doesn’t.

Why this matters editorially

A local newspaper’s events section is, in theory, one of its strongest editorial assets. It is the most practically useful page in the entire publication. People come to it not to be informed but to make a decision: what should I do this weekend?

When that page reflects only what’s ticketed, three things happen:

  1. The page becomes thin. A typical Saturday night in a mid-sized city has dozens of things going on; a ticketing-only listing might show three. Readers click in, see nothing relevant, and stop coming.

  2. The page skews toward affluence. Ticketed events trend more expensive. A reader without €60 to spend on Friday night sees nothing for them. Your events page becomes — accidentally — a luxury listing, not a community resource.

  3. The page misses the moments that build community trust. Coverage of the local choir’s Christmas concert, or the library’s poetry evening, or the school’s spring fair, builds a different kind of relationship with readers than coverage of the next stadium tour. People notice when you reflect their actual lives back to them. They notice harder when you don’t.

That last one is the deep argument. A media site’s claim to local relevance is built on whether it pays attention to what’s actually happening locally. An events page sourced from a ticketing widget is the cheapest possible answer to “are we paying attention?” — and it’s also the wrong one.

Why this matters commercially

Editorial relevance is only half the case. The other half is straightforward ad economics.

Event content drives engagement-per-session like little else: people don’t just read the listing, they click through to read more about a specific event, scroll the surrounding content, and often come back later to check details. That’s a lot of pageviews, all in the same well-defined section, all with predictable display ad performance.

But that engagement is a function of coverage breadth. A page with thirty events a weekend gets thirty times the click-through opportunities of a page with one. A page that covers the choir concert, the running club, the museum opening, and the brewery’s pop-up gets readers from every demographic in your circulation. A page with three concerts gets the small slice of readers willing to spend €60 on Friday.

The events page that earns the most ad revenue is the one that has the most events on it. That sounds tautological, but the ticketing-only widget approach implicitly disagrees with it.

The harder question

Why doesn’t every publisher do this already? Two reasons.

The first is sourcing. Pulling concerts from a ticketing API is one developer-week of work. Surfacing church recitals, library readings, and community centre evenings is genuinely hard — there’s no API for the librarian’s poetry night, no feed from the church’s choir performance. You’d need to build relationships with hundreds of small organisations across your coverage area, give them a way to submit, follow up when they don’t, format their submissions consistently, decide which to publish and where to place them.

That’s editorial work, and editorial budgets don’t stretch to a hundred small relationships maintained at scale. So publishers default to the widget.

The second is internal classification. “Events” lives in an awkward part of most newsrooms — not really news, not really arts, sometimes pushed to a marketing or commercial team, sometimes pushed to a junior editorial hire, often nobody’s actual job. A category that’s nobody’s job stays at the level of a widget.

Both of these are solvable. They have, in fact, been solved — by us and by others — through a combination of automated sourcing from non-ticketing channels, AI-assisted enrichment of submissions from small organisers, and a sourcing pipeline that doesn’t require a hundred individual editorial relationships. That’s not the point of this article. The point is that the strategic decision is the one that matters: deciding that “events” means the actual events happening in the place you cover, not the thin slice of them that happens to come with a card-payment URL.

Once that decision is made, the implementation is solvable. Until it’s made, no amount of sourcing fixes the underlying mistake.

What to do this week

If you run a media site with an events page, take five minutes and answer a single question: of the events your readers will actually attend this weekend, what fraction appears on your page?

Walk the answer through your own neighbourhood. The Saturday morning farmers’ market — is it on the page? The choir’s spring concert at the local church — is it on the page? The library’s children’s reading hour — is it on the page? The pub quiz at the place down the road that gets sixty people every week — is it on the page?

If most of the things your readers actually do this weekend aren’t on your events page, then your events page isn’t really an events page. It’s a ticketing widget with editorial framing.

The fix isn’t to drop the ticketing widget. Concerts and ticketed shows belong on the page. The fix is to stop treating that widget as the whole answer, and to build the events page that actually reflects the place you cover.

Your readers know what’s happening. The question is whether your site does.