About this guide

NYC Now Guide collects public events happening in New York City and puts them in one place, sorted by when they start, where they are and what they cost. There is no login, no newsletter wall and nothing to install. If you want to know what is on tonight, the Today page answers that in one screen.

Events are gathered automatically from the organisations that run them, and only from organisations that publish their own calendars. That currently means NYC Parks; the park conservancies — Central Park, Prospect Park, Riverside Park, Randall's Island, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Bryant Park, Little Island and The Battery; the Downtown Brooklyn business improvement district; and a growing list of museums: El Museo del Barrio, Poster House, the Museum of Chinese in America, Weeksville Heritage Center, the Wyckoff House Museum, the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum and the Staten Island Museum. Each listing keeps a link back to the organiser's own page, which is always the authority on times, tickets and cancellations.

Nothing is copied from an aggregator, and nothing is scraped from a site that asks not to be. Where an organisation blocks automated access, it is simply not listed here.

The collectors run on a schedule through the day. New events appear within hours of being published, changes to a time or a venue are picked up on the next run, and an event that disappears from its source is retired here rather than left to mislead. Nothing on the site is written by hand, so nothing is quietly out of date.

A listing tells you that something is happening. It cannot tell you whether it is worth your Saturday. That is what the guides are for: they are written by hand, they carry a byline, and they say plainly what has been verified and what you should check yourself before you get on the train.

We do not sell tickets, take a commission on them, or stand between you and the organiser. Every ticket link goes straight to the source. We do not accept payment to make an event look like an ordinary listing either — paid placements are always labelled Sponsored, and they never change the order of the free listings around them.

Many organisers publish events without a picture. Rather than leave a grey box, we show a photograph of the venue itself, taken from Wikimedia Commons under open licences. Every photographer and licence is credited on the photo credits page.

Corrections, missing venues and anything that looks wrong are welcome — see the contact page. If you want your event in front of New Yorkers, the advertising page has the details.