Toronto Life magazine starts two new blogs (including politics) & renames two others

[This post has been updated]Although it hasn't said why or what has changed [see below], Toronto Life magazine has launched a new political blog called The Informer. In July 2008 it abruptly discontinued Philip Preville's City State blog after less than three months, saying it wasn't drawing enough audience to justify its costs. (At about the same time, James Chatto's food blog Chatto's Digest, a wine blog by James Lawrason and the Toronto Movie Index were also ended.)

The magazine has announced that has launched two new blogs: The Informer is described as The discerning mediavore’s take on the news of the day, from city hall to Power Ball and The Hype, a blog about TV, movies, theatre and music. And it has renamed two existing blogs: The Dish (formerly the Daily Dish) about restaurants, and The Goods (fomerly Style) about fashion.

One of the reasons why the magazine may have gone back into blogs in a big way is that its overall online audience has expanded, with the magazine's recent announcement that it was drawing 300,000 unique visitors and more than 2 million monthly page views.

[UPDATE: Toronto Life has told us that, since the announcement cited above, traffic is now 370,00 unique visitors a month.

Matthew Fox, the editor of Torontolife.com, elaborates on the differences between the earlier political blog and the current one:

“It’s been almost two years since the days of CityState, and we have a completely different mandate and team at Torontolife.com. Early last year, we launched two very successful blogs — Daily Dish and Toronto Life Style. In your post, you mention that CityState wasn't drawing enough audience to justify its costs. As a reflection on how far we’ve come, CityState’s entire five-week run attracted barely as much traffic as Daily Dish receives in just a few weekday hours. 2010 is our chance to take the model we developed last year and use it to apply our voice to a far broader range of topics. The Dish, The Hype, The Informer and The Goods are vibrant editorial projects that work fantastically on the Web. Plus, we have a new homepage that makes the site easier than ever to navigate. There are more improvements to come before the end of the year, so stay tuned.”]