Early history and other blogs The blog
Gothamist, focused on New York City, was founded in 2003, by publisher Jake Dobkin and editor Jen Chung. In February 2005, Gothamist LLC launched
Bostonist and
Seattlest, adding
Phillyist in June 2005. In January 2011, the co-editors of the
Phillyist site announced that other commitments had moved them to reach an agreement with the Gothamist LLC publishers to let them shutdown the Philadelphia operation at month-end; in October 2011, the company decided to shutter the
Bostonist website, noting that it was creating just 1% of its network-wide traffic. , other news blogs operated by the company included
LAist for Los Angeles,
DCist for Washington, D.C.,
Chicagoist, and
SFist for
San Francisco in the United States, as well as
Shanghaiist and
Londonist internationally. Canadian blog
Torontoist was launched by the American company, but was transferred to the locally owned Ink Truck Media in April 2009, while retaining its "-ist" name and remaining affiliated with the
Gothamist network. In March 2011,
Torontoist was acquired from Ink Truck Media by St. Joseph Media, magazine publishing division of Canadian media giant
St. Joseph Communications. As a result, the site was not affected by the
Gothamist shutdown in 2017, and remained in operation until it was acquired by
Daily Hive in 2019. In a similar fashion, in 2010
Londonist was transferred to the London-based startup LDN Creative.
Shutdown In 2017,
Gothamist and all related blogs were sold to
Joe Ricketts, owner of
DNAinfo. After the acquisition,
Gothamist expunged from its archives a number of stories that had covered Ricketts critically. Regarding the removal of Ricketts related content from the site, Dobkin told
Jezebel, "Just as Bloomberg doesn't cover Bloomberg, we don't plan to cover Joe Ricketts and so we decided to take down our coverage of him. No one asked us to do it. It was a decision made solely by Jen [Chung] and me." On November 2, 2017, Ricketts posted to both
DNAinfo and the "-ist" network sites that both websites would immediately cease operations, a week after
Gothamist writers voted to unionize with the
Writers Guild of America, East. All content from all
DNAinfo sites and all subsidiary sites were taken down. The next day, archives of the sites were returned to functionality. Ricketts's shutdown was criticized as being a mere act of retaliation after the two companies' workers had joined a union. In the aftermath of the shutdown, laid-off
Gothamist reporters stated that former owners Dobkin and Chung actively cooperated with Ricketts to discourage the union efforts, calling their actions "textbook
union-busting stuff."
Relaunch On February 23, 2018, public radio stations
WNYC,
KPCC, and
WAMU announced that they had jointly acquired
Gothamist and its related sites
LAist and
DCist. Under the agreement,
Gothamist and its sister sites would begin publishing news content again. Additionally, WNYC acquired the archives of
Chicagoist and
SFist, and Chicago's
WBEZ stated that they were exploring an acquisition of the former. WAMU relaunched
DCist on June 11, 2018.
Gothamist confirmed that
Chance the Rapper acquired
Chicagoist after he announced it in a new song, "I Might Need Security", on July 18, 2018. On January 7, 2019, labor union
SAG-AFTRA and WNYC announced that they had reached an agreement to recognize more than 25 digital employees of New York Public Radio, including
Gothamist staff. Impress3 Media bought the San Francisco blog site
SFist in January 2019 and relaunched it the following month with the former editor-in-chief as a consultant. In April 2021, WNYC laid off 14 employees, amounting to 4% of total staff. This included several workers at the
Gothamist including its editor-in-chief. WAMU shut down DCist in 2024. ==Awards==