Popular Torontoist website closing

Torontoist, the popular website/blog that is part of the U.S.-based Gothamist network, is closing up shop effective with year's end. David Topping, the editor, apparently precipitated the decision by announcing his resignation.

At the end of this month, I will be stepping down as Torontoist's Editor-in-Chief. I've loved everything about this job since I started it, and my decision to leave was not an easy one to make, but it is, ultimately, the right one at the right time for the right reasons. Gothamist has decided, as a result of both my resignation and the recession, to close Torontoist on January 1, 2009 and concentrate on their more lucrative American sites. That decision is the right one, too: as it exists now, Torontoist can barely be sustained, let alone developed, and it has survived and thrived as long as it has, in spite of modest means, largely because of the ceaseless hard work of that aforementioned collective. Torontoist may return at some later date, if conditions are different; until then, it will remain in suspended animation, its content still public and searchable.

Topping said that, since he became editor in 2006, Torontoist had published seven thousand articles about Toronto and received thirty-six thousand comments and ten million hits, though the site was created in October 2004.