For most of 2008, I worked as a freelancer for Bay Area News Group, covering weekend shifts at two East Bay papers and covering whatever I could for its network of shrinking weeklies.

Most of this was events coverage, highlighting community groups doing fundraisers and running festivals. None of it was the kind of glamorous reporting I expected to be doing, but I liked the people I met and the work they did was usually important. These days, they probably have a harder time getting attention.

But these stories are a recipe for despair. They would generate nice photos and easy copy to fill Monday’s paper. They let the newspaper spin a good tale about civic engagement. But if you didn’t know about it beforehand, I was basically writing a story to make you feel sad. “This event was great. Sorry you missed it. Better luck next year.”

A calendar is a better tool for getting people to local events. If you run a local news site, you should have a calendar. But it’s more than just an event listing.

A calendar is an entry point for civic engagement. Reminding people that stuff is happening, and that there are things to be involved in locally should create an audience for the more story-centric journalism you’re doing, because it’s reminding people that there are ways to be involved.

A calendar is essential for beat reporting. Homicide Watch DC ran on its calendar. Every reporter we hired learned to listen for the next court date at every hearing and update the calendar. That powered our Week Ahead, which drove the next week’s work.

A calendar is a solution. It answers real questions, from “Where can I take the kids this weekend?” to “When will school committee decide this?”

A calendar is an expression and distillation of taste, or it can be.

In the Atlantic a couple weeks ago, Gabriel Kahane wrote about the glory days of arts and concert listings, and how music editor Steve Smith used the calendar in Time Out New York:

Time Out “was a magazine that was basically nothing but the listings,” Smith told me. “Nobody said, ‘Oh, that obscure thing that’s happening on a loading dock in Tribeca? No, that’s too weird.’ I was basically told, ‘List what’s interesting; list what people will want to know about.’” A coveted red asterisk denoted a critic’s pick. “I had the privilege,” he said, “of making a difference in the lives of a number of composers and performers. And that, to me, was the most gratifying piece of the job.”

One of the lives he changed was mine. The first review I ever received as a singer-songwriter, for a set at Tonic, was written by Smith, for his blog Night After Night. A 33-word listing in Time Out came soon after—a blurb that would remain in my press kit for years. In 2009, he interviewed me for a New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure profile. The morning after the story ran, Lincoln Center called my manager and offered me a debut on its American Songbook performance series. Who reviewed that concert for the Times? None other than Steve Smith.

But those listings have largely disappeared. Kahane traces their decline to changes in taste and a winner-take-all trend in popular culture. I can add other suspects.

A calendar can be an orphan in a newsroom, especially where bylines and page views are counted. It helps everyone but gives credit to no one in particular.

A calendar needs tools to support it. A content management system built around articles turns everything into an article. Breaking out of default mode of publishing requires both editorial and technical support. It requires doing something harder instead of doing the same thing we’ve gotten in the comfortable habit of doing.

This gives us a double-ended market failure. If a calendar is hard to make and support, so newsrooms spend time on other things. When CMS vendors or tech teams ask what newsrooms want, calendars don’t come up, because they’re no one’s priority.

And so we get more articles about events you wish you’d known about beforehand.