Long-standing music site starts publishing again, and we are cautiously excited.

By Hamutal Dotan

At the end of July, long-standing music site CHARTattack stopped publishing. At the time, Exclaim reported that on July 29 “managing editor Aaron Brophy sent an email to Chartattack.com contributors that read, ‘Effective immediately, Chart Communications is suspending publication of the website Chartattack.com.’” Nobody was quite sure why, but most were saddened by the news—CHARTattack was a mainstay of Canadian music coverage that many of us had come to count on.

Yesterday, happier news. Four new posts popped up on the site, the first of which was titled simply, “We’re Back!“. The post didn’t say much more—only that a press release would be forthcoming—but we emailed publisher Edward Skira to see if we could find out more. His reply: “”We’ve sold CHARTattack.com to another firm. They will be re-launching soon. Any further comments or announcements will come from them.” (Disclosure: Skira also published UrbanToronto, which cross-posts to Torontoist periodically.) We look forward to hearing all about these new owners soon, and have our fingers crossed that CHARTattack‘s return won’t be marked by any massive editorial changes. And in the meantime, welcome back!

UPDATE: October 11, 2011, 3:30 PM CHARTattack‘s new owner is arts and culture startup andPop, and one of their contributors, Dan Busheikin, will be the site’s editor, reports John Semley over at A.V. Club Toronto. What will Busheikin change? “We’re going to preserve the things that people love and that are a part of Chart’s legacy,” he says. “But now I have the opportunity to try and tweak Chart, which had kind of lost focus in terms of artists it would look at, and lost its edge as a tastemaker.”