blogTO gets back into podcasts
And Narcity makes a bid to buy blogTO
As we entered 2018, blogTO continued to grow at a brisk pace. We moved from our original office space at 250 University Avenue to a larger corner unit down the hall to accommodate all the new staff who were now working from the office.
There were many new faces on the team. Lisa Power was now leading our events coverage. Lori Harito took on fitness and wellness writing. Katherine Palumbo brought strong subject-matter expertise to our travel content, covering day-trip and weekend excursions from Toronto.
Tanya Mok became a core member of the team that year, and of all the people who worked with us over the years, few had a more complete skillset for what blogTO needed. Tanya had all the digital media skills but also the kind of deep knowledge and instinct for the city that was hard to find. Her versatility allowed her to cover a wide range of subjects, from general news to food and restaurants, events, and Best of Toronto lists. I particularly appreciated her features on changing pockets of the city, such as Geary Avenue and Sterling Road.
Misha Gajewski came on as a freelancer to handle the bulk of our coverage of houses and condos for sale. Misha remains in the role today, and over time her posts expanded from a weekly cadence to almost daily. She was never shy about her assessment of how properties were decorated or whether she thought they were worth the asking price.
Her posts regularly drew angry emails from realtors upset about how their listings were described or offended that we had never sought their permission in the first place to write about them. One email, typical of the genre, demanded that we “remove the post from the internet immediately,” warned us that we would “hear from lawyers soon,” and assured us that the “seller and buyer are highly educated and won’t tolerate these privacy violations.”
I always gave the same response: we were an editorial operation, and what we published was news, not advertising for their clients.
The most significant change to our team in 2018 wasn’t who arrived. It was who left.
In March, Derek resigned. He had been with blogTO for nearly a decade and had served as Managing Editor since 2011. Under his watch, the site’s editorial operations had matured in every meaningful way, and traffic had climbed to more than 17 million page views a month. blogTO was demanding work. Derek regularly put in evenings and weekends to keep the operation running, and after nine years at that pace, he was ready for a role with a more sustainable schedule. He left for a position at Ryerson (now TMU).
I organized a team lunch at the Walrus Pub & Beer Hall, which had recently opened in the Financial District, a short walk from our office, so everyone could see Derek and reminisce before he moved on.
When word of his departure got out, I noticed some people in the industry openly questioning whether blogTO could continue to thrive without him. That spoke to the significance of his contribution, and they weren’t wrong to recognize it. Derek had played a central role in building blogTO into what it had become. But he had also spent those years helping build a foundation, a team and a set of systems that didn’t depend on any single person to sustain them. In his absence, other team members stepped up. Lauren took on additional editorial responsibilities. Aaron continued to lead video. Jaclyn ran social. I picked up a share of Derek’s day-to-day work while I searched for a replacement.
That search proved far harder than I expected. Every previous Managing Editor (Tanja, Jerrold and Derek) had been promoted from within. There was nobody on the current team who was right for the role or wanted the weight that came with it. From my perspective, the position demanded deep knowledge of the city, experience running a digital newsroom, sharp copy-editing and headline-writing instincts, a strong eye for photography, and the specific editorial sensibility I was looking for. The bar set by Derek and his predecessors was high.
It took a full year before I found a candidate I thought could grow into the role, a journalist who had previously worked at the Huffington Post. Six weeks after starting, she resigned. I tried to convince her to stay, but she had decided the role wasn’t for her. It wouldn’t be until the fall of 2020 that we found someone else to fill it.
By 2018, it had been roughly a decade since blogTO had published a podcast, and the medium had changed considerably. In the early years, we had struggled to attract advertisers and grow our audience, and distribution was concentrated almost entirely through iTunes. By now, an estimated 10 million Canadians were listening to podcasts. Distribution had expanded across a range of apps and platforms, and the advertising infrastructure had matured substantially. It still wasn’t the era of video podcasts and clips that dominates today, but podcasting had moved well beyond the early, experimental phase.
With the website, social and video operations all humming, I felt we had the bandwidth to get back in. I was prepared to run the podcast at a loss for a while, as long as the product was strong and the audience grew.
We posted the role of Podcast Host and Producer on our website’s jobs board and received a flood of applications. Two candidates who stood out were both working in the radio division at Rogers Media. Their initial interviews went well. They asked detailed questions and expressed genuine interest in the role. As part of the process, I asked each of them to produce a sample podcast.
Within days, both candidates emailed me to withdraw from consideration. A few months later, Rogers Media launched the Frequency Podcast Network and its flagship show, “The Big Story,” a daily 15-minute podcast covering the day’s major headline. Both candidates were part of the production team. It’s hard not to conclude that they had gone through our interview process for competitive research.
But I wasn’t overly concerned because the applicant I had already zeroed in on was Dani Stover, an on-air host at Toronto radio station Indie 88. I was a long-time fan of her work and was thrilled when she applied. It didn’t take long for her to be hired for the role. We also brought on Jason Perrier part-time to edit interview segments, add music, and master the audio.
The format for the podcast would be somewhat influenced by The Daily, the New York Times podcast that had launched the year before. We named the show “Only in Toronto” and hired illustrator Sarah Brown, who had been a freelance writer for the site, to design the podcast cover art.
Each episode ran about 20 minutes and was published daily, Monday through Friday, timed for a 4 p.m. release to catch commuters heading home. Each show delved into a particular topic while also covering the latest local headlines.
The first episode, which aired on June 1, 2018, explored Toronto’s chicken restaurant scene with interviews from the people behind the newly opened Chica’s Nashville Hot Chicken and the longstanding St. Matthews BBQ. Episode two tackled the controversial King Street Pilot project. The format gave us a way to cover the same kinds of stories we published on the site but with layers of context and personality that writing alone couldn’t deliver.
Producing a daily podcast was, as Dani later described it to me, hard and humbling. She was essentially a one-person team, but she leaned on other members of the blogTO team for restaurant insights, event recommendations, and interviews. Almost everyone at blogTO appeared on the podcast in some capacity. The pace was relentless. Dani once compared it to the Lorne Michaels line about Saturday Night Live: the show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30. Or in her case, 4.
Some of the best episodes showed what the podcast could do that a written article couldn’t. Dani got a private tour of Remington’s Men of Steel, the legendary strip club on Yonge Street, just before it closed. The owner walked her through the empty building for about an hour. When the Raptors won the championship in 2019, she spent the day at Nathan Phillips Square collecting audio from the thousands of people who had gathered, then went home and assembled the episode that evening.
The podcast drew listeners well beyond Toronto. Dani also heard from people who listened because they were new to the city and it was helping them learn English.
The podcast launch was well received and covered by the trade press. I was a devoted listener myself. But over time, it became clear that growing the audience would be a struggle. The response to the first episode was encouraging, but that initial audience remained the high-water mark. We eventually adjusted the format and experimented with different approaches, but nothing moved the numbers.
In September 2020, we rebranded the show as the blogTO Podcast and scaled back to twice-weekly episodes. Episode lengths ranged from 15 to 30 minutes, with each one focusing on a single topic. The lighter schedule eased the production pressure but didn’t solve the growth problem. We brought in some advertising over the life of the show, but not enough. As we neared the end of 2020, I couldn’t see a way forward that didn’t mean continuing to operate at a loss.
It was a painful decision. I loved the podcast and thought Dani was doing excellent work. Over nearly 500 episodes across two and a half years, she had built something that captured a genuine love for Toronto, and I felt that it was a personal failure that I couldn’t find a way to make it sustainable. The final episode, a story about Blake Street in Toronto, aired on November 30, 2020.
Want to listen to the podcast? Unfortunately, that’s no longer possible. While the entire podcast archive remained online after ZoomerMedia acquired blogTO, it became unavailable sometime after I left the company.
While we didn’t have meaningful competition in the podcast space, the competitive landscape in digital media was shifting to reflect broader changes in how people consumed local media. For most of blogTO’s history, the discussion of competition had mostly centred on websites, apps and platforms. Now the important battleground was Instagram, and a new generation of media brands was emerging there, almost all of them built exclusively on that single platform.
Competition was still coming from every direction. US and global brands had entered the Canadian market. Instagram-only accounts focused on specific verticals, such as food or events, were carving out audiences. And a smattering of newer digital media brands were building out city-centric strategies across multiple markets, the same multi-city approach I had tried to execute years earlier with Beyond Robson and Midnight Poutine. Meanwhile, most legacy media in Canada remained slow to invest in Instagram, leaving a vacuum that all of these new entrants were rushing to fill.
Two accounts caught my attention more than others.
6ixBuzz had started as a meme and repost account focused on Toronto hip-hop and street culture. Founded by Abraham Tekabo, who operated anonymously for years, the account grew into one of the most-followed and influential Toronto-focused presences on Instagram, eventually amassing millions of followers. Their content leaned heavily on crowdsourced viral videos, but they also conducted street interviews and covered music and nightlife, and featured material that drew considerable controversy.
Curiocity landed on our radar when we noticed they were repeatedly using our team’s photos on their Instagram account without permission. It got frequent enough that I emailed the founder, Mark Montanini, to flag it. He was gracious about it, called it an “unintentional mistake,” apologized and removed the images.
Curiocity operated out of Calgary and relied on freelancers to produce content for Instagram accounts in multiple Canadian cities. They didn’t appear to have much local knowledge of Toronto and had a habit of echoing our coverage: a topic we had posted about would almost certainly appear on the Curiocity Toronto account a day or two later. They say “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” but it was mostly just annoying, especially because the strategy seemed to be working for them.
As new competitors emerged, one that had been there since our founding back in 2004 quietly faded away.
On February 6, 2019, Daily Hive announced it had acquired Torontoist. By this point, the site had completely lost relevance after St. Joseph Media took it over and had essentially been dormant for about a year.
The announcement was full of promises. Daily Hive’s editor-in-chief, Farhan Mohamed, told Canadaland that the Torontoist archives would “remain online indefinitely” and described the site as “a living library for anyone interested in researching the city.” The acquisition post on Daily Hive pledged: “Everything you loved about Torontoist will continue, with just a bit of our signature flair.”
None of it held. The Torontoist brand was absorbed almost immediately. Its social feeds were merged or rebranded to bolster Daily Hive’s own presence. And despite the assurance that the archives would remain a living library, they were eventually taken offline.
Former Torontoist Editor David Topping wrote about the loss on LinkedIn, noting that the archives had been used by journalists, academics, researchers, and at least one author who relied on them to establish the chronology of a novel set in Toronto. “This is a too-common thing on the internet,” he wrote. “It’s not the end of the world. But it is the end of one world.” The redirect page that replaced the site read “The Torontoist was sold to Daily Hive,” which prompted Derek to comment: “They even added a ‘the’ in there to add insult to injury. There was a lot of excellent writing in those archives. What a shame.”
Years later, after ZoomerMedia had acquired blogTO and Daily Hive was under the same ownership, I suggested putting the Torontoist archives back online. Nobody objected, but nobody could find the files. They had somehow been lost over the years.
While Daily Hive was making moves, Narcity was also on the prowl for acquisitions.
Since 2016, founder Chuck Lapointe had been sending me periodic emails, “wanting to know more about [me] and [my] business.” I had received similar outreach from the founders of Daily Hive and simply ignored them all. From my perspective, all of these brands were trying to gain ground in Toronto and capture both our audience and our advertisers. I saw no benefit in helping them understand how we operated. The less any of our competitors knew about us, the better.
At the start of 2019, Chuck reached out again, this time suggesting lunch or a beer. As usual, I declined. But later that year, I happened to be in Montreal and was curious enough about Narcity’s operation to book a meeting not with Chuck, who wasn’t around, but with Patrick Lauzon, a Managing Partner. We had a cordial conversation, and afterward Patrick sent me the directional terms for a potential acquisition.
Narcity wanted to buy blogTO at a multiple of five to eight times EBITDA or one to two times revenue, and they would keep me on, at least for a while, in an advisory role. If this didn’t work for me, they were also open to something they called a franchise structure: Narcity would take a 51 per cent stake in blogTO, and assume control of technology and sales. In this scenario, I would remain on board for the foreseeable future, and lead the content strategy.
I didn’t consider the offer for more than a second. If there was going to be consolidation in the industry, I believed blogTO should be the one doing the acquiring. I viewed blogTO as the stronger, more established brand, even though Narcity was now in multiple markets. The idea that they thought they could buy us was more insulting than it was flattering.
In my next post, I’ll pick up in 2019, when blogTO made its next big platform bet by launching on TikTok.