TheBulletin.ca Journal of Downtown Toronto
Community media are sprouting Downtown like alfalfa seeds on a damp towel and it can only get better for those of us who live and hope to thrive in the heart of North America’s most exciting city.
Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods, many with their own distinct cultures, but all sharing similar ambitions and challenges. That’s nowhere more evident than Downtown, where the 14 neighbourhoods served by The Bulletin are in a condensed area where it seems everyone wants to be. That’s understandable because we’re in the commercial and culture-centre heart of Canada. Lucky we!
Both established and emerging media Downtown serve niches and nooks of local interest as well as the overview. Most interesting are those not related to the “mainstream media.” In Cabbagetown the brilliant former head of the local BIA, Doug Fisher, publishes the Cabbagetown Neighbourhood Review which he sends out both as an email for those who subscribe, and online at (without hyphens): www. cabbagetownreview.blogspot.ca.
Doug covers local personalities, businesses and happenings, updates his blog daily and delivers a professional presentation of both formats. He inspired and encouraged another Cabbagetowner to go to press—a real press on newsprint.
Pete Lovering, a graphic designer, invented the Parliament Street News, a quarterly tabloid newsprint info flyer that promotes events and local businesses bordering that iconic Old Town Toronto street its entire length.
The Garden District, between Carlton and Queen, Yonge and Sherbourne, is dealt with in part by the Cabbagetown community media.
The Corktown Residents & Business Assn., (CRBA) publishes the Corktowner, a seasonal quarterly and also operates the www.corktown.ca website keeping locals advised of current events that affect them.
The Entertainment District BIA keeps a solid website going to promote area businesses, and is especially active in the stunning redevelopment of a pedestrian-friendly John Street. It is also active in promoting the health of the district’s retailers and preserving it from condo encroachment that would devastate those very special businesses that give the district its name: “Entertainment.”
Various websites are also bringing community to Downtown, whether it’s specialized restaurant sites, shopping sites or generalized local news: sites like www.blog.TO, a compendium of up-to-the-minute happenings in the city. On New Year’s Eve it had a huge list of optional activities going on in Toronto and a list of the 15 most anticipated new restaurant openings in the city. Almost like NOW, another long-term non-mainstream survivor in print as well as on the net. In fact, NOW has been around so long it’s considered faux mainstream by many. But don’t let that dissuade you. NOW is definitely alternative and swims in various directions away from the mainstream flow.
It’s lesser competitor is the Grid, which TorStar offers and seems embarrassed to support. In fact, when it was launching after that huge media firm’s Eye was poked out, the evidently underfinanced Grid was looking for free editorial content by offering “internships” to those willing to write for nothing but clippings and a pat on the bum.
(The Bulletin isn’t in the big leagues pay-wise, but we do pay all our writers, including interns.)
Spacingtoronto.ca talks about the city and is part of a string of municipal Spacings blogs. Torontoist.com is another news-filled website devoted to the GTA with a high ranking picked by NOW as second best in the city (after shedoesthecity.com).
There are a multitude of community-oriented websites and publications. The landscape is constantly changing.
The print publications are putting up “pay-walls,” meaning they charge to see the online articles they used to post for free. So many people are viewing their news on smart phones, pads and computers that print publications are somewhat in decline. The Bulletin, mailing over 72,000 copies monthly, has discovered that many condo renters, such as some living around SkyDome, rarely visit their mailboxes. They do everything online from paying bills to reading news.
As a result our 12-year-old website has risen in Alexa rankings from over 12 millionth in the world to under 708 thousandth. (Lower the number the more popular the site.) So on Valentine’s Day we’re revamping it to an up-to-date WordPress site that’s fully interactive, enabling you to comment on any story you wish to.
It will have frequent daily updates and serve as a portal to other Internet features both Toronto-based and worldwide.
It will have many videos and other creative features we and our programmers have spent a lot of time dreaming up.
We’ll still print and we’ll still mail. But we’ll also have more on-street newspaper racks so those who rarely visit their mailboxes will be able to hold in their hands a full-colour newspaper edition of The Bulletin (when they’re not reading it online on their phones with our thanks to www.nulayer.com, an amazing Toronto company of over 20 artists, developers and entrepreneurs that specializes in creating web and mobile online products.
