These are tough times for people who care about arts and culture in Manchester. First our weekly listings magazine City Life closed, then Time Out shelved plans to produce a Manchester edition. The morning Metro scrapped its local arts section, then the Manchester Evening News cut staff and scaled back arts coverage.

What remains is a patchy collection of websites and fanzines. While some are very good, they don’t quite add up to the kind of comprehensive arts coverage – thoughtful criticism, well-informed previews, meaty interviews – that you’d expect in a city of Manchester’s cultural clout.

Our case is not unique. Look at any UK city outside London and you’ll see the same thing happening. As the traditional model of using advertising to finance the production and distribution of print media becomes more difficult to sustain, magazines and newspapers are disappearing and nothing is replacing them.

This isn’t just a bad situation for the cultural consumer, it’s terrible for artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians, and the venues that showcase their work. It’s now far more difficult for them to reach the masses of people who don’t visit their websites, follow them on Twitter or subscribe to their email lists. A vital link in the chain has been broken, and the cultural life of the city is the poorer for it.

We want to curate a selection of the city’s best blogs and create a place where readers can browse through their latest posts as if they were turning the pages of a magazine.

But are we missing something here? In these same cities there are scores of arts and culture bloggers reviewing photography exhibitions, previewing music festivals, writing detailed responses to books, and in some cases, publishing high quality interviews and features that wouldn’t be out of place in a weekend review. The problem is, they’re labouring alone. They don’t have marketing departments or distribution networks. You have to know about them to get to their content, and most people don’t.

I don’t mean to suggest that every local culture blogger is consistently putting out high quality content. They’re working without editors and often without a lot of writing experience, so it may seem unpolished to readers weaned on national arts criticism. But the upside of that lack of expertise is a freshness and accessibility, a welcome immediacy to their work. They are generally writing their blogs for their own enjoyment, in their free time, and that passion comes through.

In Manchester we’re fortunate to have a mature blogging community, a reflection of the city’s strength as a digital hub. We’ve got fine local bloggers like Words & Fixtures, Follow The Yellow Brick Road and Run Paint Run Run covering visual art, folks like The Pigeon Post covering music, and too many good literary bloggers to list here. Others specialise in crafts, photography, architecture, food, kids’ activities, and even enjoying the city’s parks (see Parklover.) All put out good writing that’s read by a couple of hundred people at best.

This is why I’m part of a group of local bloggers working on a Manchester aggregator. An aggregator is a website that uses feeds to pull in content from various sources – in our case, blogs – and publishes them on a single destination site. (Well-known aggregators include The Huffington Post and The Drudge Report).

We want to curate a selection of the city’s best blogs and create a place where readers can browse through their latest posts as if they were turning the pages of a magazine. And eventually, we’d like to start publishing the best posts in an occasional print publication, bridging the gap between online and off. This is something that appears to be working well in London with theblogpaper, a free newspaper consisting solely of bloggers’ content.

This aggregator plus paper model I’m proposing could be successful in any decent-sized city. The technology isn’t outrageously complicated, and web hosting is cheap. What it requires is an active community of bloggers who are willing to invest their time in such a project. Producing a print edition – even something like a quarterly, small-run tabloid newspaper – would require money, and it’s not clear where it would come from. Advertising, subscriptions, single-issue sponsorship, and community or cultural funding are all possibilities to explore.

Through the aggregator, we mean to organise the bloggers into a kind of collective – a bloggers’ guild, to use an old-fashioned idea. By pooling their energies, they could start functioning as an alternative press: expanding their readership, developing relationships with regular cultural institutions, and building their credibility.

An aggregator would be good for artists and arts institutions, who would have a new channel through which to engage with the city’s cultural consumers. And it would be good for all of us on the look out for interesting things to read and watch and hear and see, all of us who want to experience the best our city has to offer.

Image: Kate Feld