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ShareSurprising even its own contributors, the city’s most popular blog, Torontoist, this week announced its imminent closure.
In a goodbye note posted last Friday, editor David Topping wrote that he chose to resign “at the right time for the right reasons,” without fully explaining those reasons. Faced with his resignation, lagging ad sales and a recession, he said, the site’s publisher, New York City’s Gothamist, had responded by discontinuing the blog.
If only that were the full story. There’s more that needs to be said before the site’s stated closing date of January 1.
For the past four years, Torontoist has been one of the most consistently interesting, up-to-date blogs in the city. It’s part of a network of blogs – the most successful on the Internet – operating under the Gothamist LLC umbrella.
It was founded in 2004 by the author of this column and a talented friend. We ran the site for about two years before turning it over to other qualified candidates.
A few transient editors later, Topping took the helm.
Almost immediately, he modernized the design of the site, making it more attractive than it had ever been before. Traffic skyrocketed.
The outlandishly young man (18 at the time!) had his share of misfires, too. I was most uncomfortable with allowing public space zealots and political partisans to hijack the editorial direction. But ultimately, the site blossomed into a solid source of Toronto-centric information and media. In fact, it was solid enough to be named the city’s best website by this very newspaper recently, and then again by our readers.
That’s why the end of the site is such a head-spinning surprise and disappointment.
For his part, Topping isn’t being completely forthright. Yes, there’s a worldwide recession, and Torontoist, the lone Canadian outpost of a for-profit American company, without the advertising interconnectedness of the U.S. sites, would be first to go.
But online is indisputably the place to be for ad sales. The Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada, for one, quotes predictions of double-digit growth in online advertising spending in 2009. With low overhead and only four years in the game, blaming the recession just doesn’t hold.
It comes down to a classic labour-management divide. Topping says he needed more resources to grow the Torontoist. Gothamist disagreed.
In a dispute with his publisher over the direction of the site, Topping refused to follow the template of fewer bloggers writing more. Over what he considered moves that jeopardized the site’s quality, he seems to have protested by quitting without naming a successor. Gothamist, losing money on Torontoist, took the easy way out by shutting it down.
If Topping believes he resigned on the grounds of integrity and is justified in not handing the reins to one of his more-than-willing staff, he is absolutely wrong. There are passionate and able writers in this city (and on the site masthead) who would gladly step in, regardless of what resources were available. I should know; I never received a cent running Torontoist.
Besides, Topping owes it to his readers and staff to ensure the site’s continuation, no matter what direction it takes. There is no alternative, especially considering that Toronto’s other group blog, BlogTO, is so bland it’s offensive.
Topping tells me he’s encouraged by the outpouring of support he’s received and will look for a way to continue a group blog in Toronto. He also left the door open for Torontoist to re-emerge at a later date – both positive moves.
But, a final message to Topping and whoever might next edit the city’s only worthwhile group blog: Torontoist is well written, and well read, and thus does not deserve this fate. The site must go on.
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Seriously?! BlogTO often has the news before anyone else. Their site design is cleaner, their content better organized and more diverse.
They also don't suffer from the self-centered, ego driven attitudes and hipster levels of cynicism (see your own story last week, "Torontoist" could have been another type of hipster, the kind that likes to listen to itself talk because it thinks it so smart because it goes to UofT) that fuel much of the drivel that Torontoist publishes.
BlogTO's been moving forward to be more than a blog, has branched out into printed maps of the city, and just generally gives a sense that it's evolving. By comparison, Torontoist feels like my curmudgeonly old grandfather.
Last I heard Torontoist also consistently had a lower readership.
I've always found BlogTO to be full of useful information...maybe that's why you find it bland. But someone should tell Torontoist there are other ways to be interesting other than shitting all over everything.
If you want to read a blog with useful restaurants reviews that give some insight and information, by people who actually appear to know something about what they're putting into their mouths, check out TasteTO.com.
PS: Backroom bullshit aside, I'll miss Torontoist. I hope something good rises from the ashes.
The publisher is in NYC and generally deals with the editor exclusively, and by email. It would be hard for that publisher to select the best candidate. The editor is in the position to do so, and, as I argue, he should.
If publications folded every time an editor moved on, we'd have very few of them, don't you think?
1. The site is not "set up as a vehicle for ad sales". In fact, NOW is much more set up for that than we are. We keep ads to a minimum, and we have a strict separation between Church and State. Unlike NOW, we do not accept advertorial, and, unlike NOW, we don't run those annoying over the page or floating banners. Further, all our restaurant listings and reviews are also editorial. A business CANNOT PAY US to be included unlike sites like Dine.to, Toronto.com etc. which are essentially paid business listings. And unlike sites like, say, Martini Boys we don't just review places that can afford to hire PR firms and throw big media launch parties. Finally, we also have standards for what advertisers we accept. Unlike NOW, we don't accept ads from escort services and other companies that we don't think our community would be interested in. We actually turn away advertising on many occasions because of these principles.
2. Like any site, there's always things that we can do better. But whatever we do we put the user first. NOW seems to have ignored basic principles in usability in designing this site and I think everyone would agree that NOW has been late to the web game. The site's traffic stats tell the story. NOW's traffic has declined steadily over the past couple of years and the botched attempt to create their own blog - NOW DAILY - is a joke. If Josh wants to paint a site as bland he doesn't need to do much more than look in the mirror.
3. Regarding Torontoist, I just want to say that I'm a fan of Torontoist. I've never considered them "rivals" to blogTO and I'm a regular reader of their site. They cover different stuff then we do and have a different personality even if we do sometimes overlap on our editorial coverage and have some shared readership. But, it's not a zero sum game when it comes to covering this city and I'm sure NOW and EYE can attest to that.
4. Finally, it's worth noting the inherent biases in this article and at NOW MAGAZINE as a whole. Joshua Errett was a former editor of Torontoist and while he was there he had nothing but disdain for blogTO. That's carried on to NOW but from his current perch he's part of a machine that is watching its readership and advertisers migrate to the web where, frankly, NOW has not been strong. It's in NOW's best interests to see a site like blogTO NOT BE SUCCESSFUL since we are taking both ad dollars and readership away from them.
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