How It's Made: The COYOTE Calendar

When COYOTE was just a gleam in a few frustrated reporters' eyes, we started asking around about what people wanted to see from a new, totally hypothetical publication. Over and over again, we heard the same thing: calendar, calendar, calendar.

Calendars are a hallmark of alt-weekies. “Those listings were so important, because that’s what told you how to live your life in the city as a person who loved the arts," Ann Powers told Emma Silvers for her piece about the beauty and magic of the alt-weekly. Sadly, many of those alt-weeklies have perished, leaving behind a hole for those interested in filling their days (and nights) with local events. Here at COYOTE we knew we wanted to try and fill that gap.

The question, really, was how.

The thing about calendars is that they're deceptive. How hard could it be, you might think? It's just a list of events? Well, buddy, think again. At alt-weeklies that had calendars there were often several people whose entire job was finding, selecting, formatting, and listing events. Today, calendar curators have to scour Facebook, Eventbrite, Luma, individual venue websites, Partiful, Meetup, Signal chats, Slack groups, newsletters, physical flyers, and don't even get me started on Instagram. (Event people: I beg you, please, post your events outside of Instagram, too. If you don't, people without Instagram accounts can't see your stuff! And for the love of god PLEASE add alt-text.)

Then, once we have our list of options, things get even harder. How do you pick? Nobody wants a truly full, raw list of every single thing that exists in their area (sorry to Steve and his Beatles-only karaoke nights). Even with filters, a gigantic list is too unwieldy to be useful most of the time. Ultimately, a good calendar is one with taste. People don't just want to know what is happening, they want to know what they should go do.

Luckily, there are lots of great calendar-shaped things out there in the Bay Area: 19hz, Oakland Review of Books, Decentered Arts Event Lister, Foopee, Funcheap, Art Board, KALW, The Tenderloin Voice, and more. Each has its own scope and curatorial lens — punk shows, regional specificity, price point, vibe. 

Here at COYOTE, I’ve thought a lot about what ours should be. What makes the cut for COYOTE, and what doesn't? What are we offering that is unique? We're still figuring that out like everyone else. But over the last six months, I've developed a few baseline rules for what goes into our calendar, and I'm now going to tell you all my secrets:

1. We actually think the event looks interesting. This is the most subjective, but also perhaps the most important. We want to highlight things that are surprising and cool and sound like something we'd actually tell our friends about. 
2. We think that readers might not have heard about this event already. The Ruth Asawa exhibit at the SFMOMA was great! I saw it twice. But you don't need us to tell you about it. They've got billboards and bus ads for that.
3. This one is something I heard best articulated by Marthine Satris, who curates the Oakland Review of Books calendar: we want to highlight things that are from here. COYOTE believes that the Bay Area is full of interesting, creative, and special people doing interesting, creative, and special things. We're generally going to veer towards local artists, authors, musicians, athletes, and the like over people who are coming into town from elsewhere.
4. Regional diversity matters. COYOTE aims to serve the whole Bay Area, not just the West Bay and the East Bay. Each week I spend probably more time trying to find North and South Bay events than I do on any other piece of the calendar. (If you've got events to suggest, hit me up at calendar@coyotemedia.org.)
5. COVID is still here y'all. Thankfully the Bay Area has a bunch of folks curating COVID-safe events. Every week, I try really hard to highlight at least one event (if not more) where pandemic safety is still being taken into account.
6. Everybody is fucking broke. Sure, we'll throw a couple splurgy things on here and there, but in general we try to focus our events listing on stuff that regular people can reasonably afford: Every day I aim to have at least one FREE event on the list.

There are other things I think about too: making sure to include some events that are family friendly, finding a good spread of different kinds of listings (stuff for computer nerds, raves, hikes, academic talks, sports), giving options for early birds and night owls. The goal is to make something where at least once a week you're like, "Oh wow, I DO want to go to that!"

What all of this adds up to is that each week, COYOTE posts a list of events spanning thousands of words that we've put a lot of thought into. We've featured mushroom identification classes, puppets, billiards, ultimate frisbee, mutual aid events, kinky crafts, vampire drag, paper fruit, psychics, water-themed raves, and more. For each event I wrote an original blurb trying to convey something funny or interesting about the entry.

On a personal note, I love nothing more than running into someone at an event and learning that they heard about it through COYOTE. If you love the calendar, and you see me out and about, please say hi! It makes my day.