The Calgary Herald’s Swerve brand was the paper’s arts and culture sister property, with its own editorial voice, its own cover stars, and its own audience. Swerve published from inside the Calgary Herald blog network but it was not the Calgary Herald — it covered the bands playing the Saddledome, the openings at Glenbow, the restaurants worth the drive, and the things the city actually did on the weekend. That distinction shaped the build.
Why the chain newspaper-theme did not fit
Swerve was not a daily-newspaper blog theme. The Postmedia WordPress® VIP platform ran a standardised theme family that served the daily papers across the chain, with sensible defaults, consistent navigation, and a content model built around the news desk. That theme was the right answer for The StarPhoenix, The Province, the Calgary Herald itself, and the rest of the daily-paper family. It was the wrong answer for an arts brand whose readers were arriving on Thursday evening trying to figure out what to do on Friday night.
Geolocation-driven event personalisation in 2011
A bespoke WordPress VIP property with its own theme and information architecture, and a publishing model built around events and community rather than around the news cycle. Event pages were first-class objects, not appended widgets. The home page led with what was happening this week, not with what had happened today.
The unusual feature, and one of the early-stage experiments I am still proudest of from this build, was the location layer. If a reader chose to share their location, the site reordered the front-page event listings to lead with what was happening near them, and surfaced advertiser placements for venues and shops within a relevant distance of where the reader was. This was 2011, when the HTML5 Geolocation API was technically available in modern browsers but almost no editorial site was actually using it for content personalisation. The experiment was early enough that we were still figuring out the right shape for the permission prompt itself.
That last part mattered. A site that punishes a reader for declining a permission prompt teaches them not to grant any. Swerve was deliberately built so the location feature was additive — better with it, fine without it. A reader who declined the prompt saw the same city-wide event coverage every other reader saw, with no nag, no degraded layout, and no second-attempt modal three pages later.
Where Swerve consolidated back into the Herald
The Swerve brand was eventually folded back into the Calgary Herald, and the standalone subsite I worked on wound down with that consolidation. The location-based personalisation pattern, on the other hand, became standard editorial practice over the following decade. Most newsroom verticals that handle events now do something like it, with cleaner UX patterns for the consent step and more accurate location APIs underneath, but the underlying principle is the same one the Swerve experiment was working out a decade earlier.
- Platform: WordPress VIP, custom theme and content framework
- The build: Bespoke arts-and-events property on Postmedia infrastructure, with browser-geolocation-driven event personalisation and advertiser placement
- Client: Postmedia Network — Swerve / Calgary Herald
- Period: 2011–2012
Where this pattern transfers
Any local-events publication, any neighbourhood-scale arts brand, any city magazine, and any “things to do this weekend” property has a version of the Swerve job. The audience is not arriving for headlines. They are arriving for a decision about how to spend their next few free hours, and the build’s job is to make that decision easier without making the reader feel inventoried. The platform-level decision (use the chain’s standard newspaper theme, or build a bespoke property that fits this brand) almost always settles in favour of bespoke once you take the audience’s actual question seriously.
