Spacing goes Atlantic

Spacing magazine is accelerating towards having a coast-to-coast presence. Later this month (October 28) a new daily Atlantic blog will join the current Spacing Toronto and Spacing Montreal blogs. It will be written, according to a story in Masthead, for now, for free by a volunteer staff, including two former summer interns at the magazine, but there are plans in future to pay bloggers, says Matt Blackett, the publisher and creative director.

No sooner will the Spacing Atlantic blog hit the web than additional blogs will be launching in Ottawa in November and in Vancouver early in 2010.

Blackett reports that Spacing Toronto and Spacing Montreal between them bring in about 10,000 visitors a day; the new blogs should double that.

As in Toronto, merchandise will feature in the Atlantic version. A lucrative sideline of Spacing is to sell buttons of Toronto Transit subway stops. There is no subway in Atlantic Canada, so the buttons that will be on sale at the new blog's launch will be of the street names that are etched into the sidewalks around Halifax.

Blackett told Masthead that the issues for which the magazine is best known are much across urban Canada. “It’s about providing sustainable transportation, great green spaces, attractive waterfronts,” he says.