Gothamist

History

The namesake blog, Gothamist, focused on New York City, was founded in 2003, with launches in other cities shortly thereafter. As of June 2014 other blogs operated by the company include LAist, DCist, Chicagoist, and SFist in the United States, as well as Shanghaiist 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 giants St. Joseph Communications. In a similar fashion, in 2010 Londonist was transferred to the London-based startup LDN Creative.

Gothamist was co-founded by publisher Jake Dobkin and editor Jen Chung. Dobkin and Chung are also credited as co-founders and as publisher and executive editor, respectively, of all other Gothamist-owned blogs. Dobkin is frequently included in lists of the wealthiest bloggers; estimates quote his monthly salary from Gothamist at $110,000.

The flagship Gothamist blog has received a number of awards and commendations, including six Bloggies nominations. It was named a "Forbes Favorite", and a BusinessWeek "Best of the Web". In 2007, Gothamist was named blog of the year by Wired magazine and given a Wired Rave Award.

In 2017, Gothamist and all related blogs were sold to Joe Ricketts' DNAinfo.com. At the same time, Gothamist expunged from its archives a number of stories that had covered Rickets critically. Regarding the removal of Rickets related content from the site, Gothamist co-founder Jake Dobkin was quoted by Jezebel as saying, “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.”