Earlier this week, Toronto Life killed off their blogs. The move was a surprising one, especially since the magazine was one of the few local print outlets that had finally started to figure out how to create interesting and original content online that was separate from but complimentary to what could be found in print. According to Toronto Life's Online Editor, Matthew Fox, the magazine is "re-evaluating where we are investing our Web editorial......

Well, that didn't take long: Toronto Life has pulled the plug on Philip Preville's City State blog, on James Chatto's Chatto's Digest, and probably on Doug Bell's Spectator, too. Chatto was gone as of June 19, and today Preville wrote a post on City State that first read (in our RSS reader, at least) that "City State is being discontinued as of this post, as is its sister blog, Doug Bell’s wonderfully amusing Spectator, so......

This is how today's AY    R arrived at subscribers' doorsteps. The wrap was last year's innovation. The beer "coaster" is a piece of paper stuck on like a post-it note. We wonder what 2009 will bring.......

Severed feet are turning up on beaches in British Columbia—this Monday, the fifth one in the past year floated onto Westham Island, south of Vancouver. It's the first left foot found in a sea of rights, and the gruesome mystery has provided fodder for many a news organization. This week, the Globe published two versions of the story onto their website: one in the British Columbia section and the other in National. The stories......

Back in the 1960s, if you were female and wanted to be a journalist, you would have had to content yourself with getting coffee for the “real” reporters (i.e. men), making copies (for men), and maybe (if you were lucky) doing research work and writing (which men would read). Barbara Walters changed that, paving the way for everyone from Diane Sawyer and Christiane Amanpour to Meredith Vieira and Katie Couric. She was in Toronto last......

"City State," writes Toronto Life's Philip Preville in his first post on the magazine's new blog of that name, "will try to take some of the piss out of this town." To wit:Here’s another urban riddle for you: Why doesn’t Toronto have a better sense of humour about itself? Wit, pun, snark, cheek and parody are the only sensible responses to Rob Ford, the TTC’s union, the new black hole–size recycling bins, the CN......

William Morassutti and the TORO girls at his Brant House (yes, Brant House) launch party. A picture is worth 1000 words, or roughly twice as long as the average article in the new TORO "Magazine." It took us two mornings to recover from the oceans of alcohol imbibed at the TORO online launch party on Wednesday, peel our champagne goggles from our mascara-encrusted eyes, and take a deep breath and a second look at......

In an article in last Saturday's Globe about NOW and Eye's dwindling readerships, Eye's City Editor Edward Keenan told the Globe that "we keep asking, how do we reinvent ourselves? But maybe we should stop trying to be the best of a dying species." Keenan's words felt a bit out of place, coming, as they did, at the end of an article that featured the publishers of both weeklies assuring the Globe that their......

Remember when the town crier would stand on Yonge Street and shout his hear-say and hear-ye, passing out copies of the daily news for a penny a pop? Yeah, us neither. The fast-spreading news of today is a far cry from days of old (take us for example), and we'll bet you didn't see what was coming next. But tomorrow at the corner of Queen and John, you just might. Walk past Pages and......

Photos of CablePulse24's broadcast on July 25, 2007, courtesy of Joel Charlebois. Just before noon on July 25, 2007, Joel Charlebois caught a man, he says, breaking into his house. When Charlebois gave chase, the man fell from the second-storey deck, landing hard on the ground below and breaking his leg. As police arrived, Charlebois—an avid photographer who has a Flickr account under the name uwajedi, who is an active member of Torontoist's Flickr......

ThinkWater.ca, the Canadian manifestation of the United Nations' Water for Life campaign, is by all appearances a worthy project, aimed at educating citizens in various facets of water conservation, from the problems with bottled water, to the benefits of more efficient toilets. One of its TV ads [MPG], in which random shoppers in Kensington Market are quizzed on their knowledge of storm water management (and are grossed out to learn that everything that goes......

Several ways to interpret the stated goal of "reporting some of the happier happenings in our community": An opportunity for budding reporters to hone their skills on enlightening human interest stories and positive community events that fly under the radar during a typical grim news day. A momentary respite from the sensationalism creeping into the news world. A program that allows a media outlet like CFRB to break in fresh young talent gently, without......

No, it's not a printing error—all 815,000 copies of Metro across the country really are pink today. The stunt is in support of the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, and the ad-supported free daily is donating 5% of today's national advertising revenue to the CBCF (what that amount actually is remains undisclosed, but editions of Metro are also published in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Montréal, and Halifax). Corporate sponsors are crucial to the Canadian Breast......

Torontoist had a major hard-on for Toro Magazine during its four-year run as Canada's handsomest glossy. So when the thinking lad's mag shrivelled up back in spring 2007 (proving, sadly, that subscribers and awards mean little without advertisers and government funding), its sudden absence from newsstands left us frustrated and unfulfilled. Investigative reporting, social commentary, witty essays, and tits? We couldn't find all this between the sheets of any other rag in the country.......

At this time last year, BBC journalist Alan Johnston was being held hostage. For the three years before he was kidnapped by a Palestinian jihadist organization called the Army of Islam, Johnston was the last foreign correspondent brave enough to live and work in the volatile Gaza Strip. He spent four months as a hostage, from March 12 until his release 114 days later on July 4. To celebrate World Press Freedom Day, Alan......

It's 1:45 a.m. now. The TTC strike is done: twelve hours ago, TTC employees were legislated back to work by the provincial government; nine hours ago, TTC service started back up; not too far from now, employees' Monday morning shifts will start as usual, in time to transport the morning rush. But you wouldn't know that from the Star's Strike Watch blog, which the front page of the Star's website still links to, which......

Despite its excellent online coverage from 10:30 p.m. Friday and onwards, not all print editions of Saturday's National Post carried news of the TTC strike. All versions of its Toronto Magazine, however, included the presciently coincidental graphics shown above (Post illustrators' responses to the predictably utopian sentiments of the "My Toronto Is..." tourism ads proffered by OCAD advertising students for their annual let's-generate-PR-for-a-billboard-company contest). Graphics by Jonathon Rivait and Steve Murray, respectively.......

Every Saturday morning, beginning today, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today. Telegram Building, southeast corner of Bay and Melinda, 1940s. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 8908 Mention "Bay Street" and the usual image is the financial institutions that line its sidewalks. Many of those rushing to the office with a newspaper in hand may not realize how......

The above video—not safe for work unless you're using headphones—was shot by the late Peter Walker and is a clip from Min Sook Lee's documentary Hogtown: The Politics of Policing (winner of the best Canadian feature prize at Hot Docs 2005). Uploaded to YouTube fewer than three weeks ago, it's been passed around online over the last few days, since being linked to by Toronto Life's Philip Preville in a Friday blog post. The......

Being a TV reporter is dangerous work. Just ask intrepid reporter Rob Leth, who set out on a fine sunny day to do a typical fluff piece in Riverdale Park. We're still unclear about what exactly he was hoping to accomplish with a camera and his "trusty stopwatch" at the bottom of the toboggan hill. He could have been timing a toboggan race or demonstrating how quickly sledders could lose control. Or maybe it......

Well, it's that time of year again: time to hate the TTC! This time, it's the threat of a distant strike and the Star's devotion of its usually excellent Fixer feature to all things TTC (and broken) leading the charge. When Eye's Dale Duncan recapped the past week, she remarked: "Maybe it’s just me, but rage against the TTC seems to be growing." It's not just her. "Seems," though, seems to be the key......

Photo by Jonathan Goldsbie. According to a December 2004 article in the Globe, Mike Harris is (or at least was at the time) the chairman of video advertising company Onestop; he got on board "in return for an equity stake" in the business. Presuming that he still has that stake (and why wouldn't he? he may be evil, but he's not stupid), Harris became a richer man two weeks ago, when the Toronto Transit......

Since January 2006, quirky black-and-white brushstroke illustrations have graced the back page of the The New York Times Magazine. The work is that of Toronto-based designer and OCAD teacher Bob Hambly, who just completed his 500th illustration—a bus—for the prestigious Sunday newspaper supplement. "Even after twelve years, I still get that little pang in my stomach each time a new story is sent to me," he says. "I feel a great sense of responsibility for......

Photo of Deerhoof courtesy of Four Paws Media. Canadian Music Week officially kicks off today. The bulk of the week’s action is, mysteriously, crammed into Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, but there are a couple of shows tonight that are set to get the week off to a promising start.......

Every weekday morning, bright and early, we feature a photo (or two) from a photographer in the Torontoist Flickr Pool. It's our way of giving the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention that they deserve. partly cloudy, chance of torture BY MOONWIRE......

According to the Inside the CBC blog and the National Post, Toronto's favourite boyish-looking provocateur, Avi Lewis, is back on the airwaves with his newest show, Frontline: USA. The show promises to "strip away the spin and highlight real issues such as poverty, violence, race, health, and immigration" in America. Considering that Lewis is involved and that the show airs on Al Jazeera English, chances are that Frontline: USA won't be a Dobbsian exercise......

The above "Obey Spray" illustration is one of a series of Madvertisements (also featuring products such as "Empowermints" and conditions such as "Excessive Patriotism Disorder") by media tigress Carly Stasko, originally published in the January/February 2002 issue of This Magazine. Look familiar? Says Stasko of the "Obay" campaign for Ontario colleges, they're "so similar that I'm wondering if we just had the same idea or if they have riffed off of my original." (We......

This, today's Globe and Mail editorial cartoon. The cartoon was published out of context below the Letters to the Editor in today's Globe. But it's very likely a reference to this news story (about which the Globe published a story in a sidebar on Saturday, but nothing in today's paper). Just like the math on the board, we didn't get it. Thanks to Kevin for the tip.......

Forget Harlequin––the results from NOW's massive love and sex survey are now out. It's got all the usual features of the Love and Sex issue, like a front cover (at left) that'll make prudes just as mildly uncomfortable as the usual back American Apparel ad will, and tons of glorious, glorious data, this year from just under 6,000 respondents. Among the salient points from the forty questions: we are getting gayer ("sexual fluidity is on......

Forget death and taxes: the one real constant in life is breathy local news coverage of almost any kind of weather. Watching TV news reporters acting bewildered by temperature fluctuations or any amount of precipitation, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the giant dome that has maintained the city's perfect 21° year-round weather for hundreds of years had just broken down, letting sandstorms, radiation, and monsters invade the city from the post-apocalyptic wasteland that......