Results tagged “torontoist”

In the latest in our series of live online discussions co-hosted with our partners at the Globe and Mail, at 5 p.m. today, Thursday, Torontoist will be joined by the Toronto District School Board's new Education Director, Chris Spence—and he'll be taking your questions. Though Spence is proposing a whole host of changes ("more parental engagement in education, 'full-service schools' with facilities to support students' families, better digital technology in classrooms, green-energy initiatives, and a renewed effort to stem losses of 4,000 students a year by hiring a marketing director," as the Globe sums it up) he's most in the news for proposing an all-male elementary school.

Last week, Torontoist launched books.torontoist.com, our satellite site devoted to the wonderful world of all things literary, edited by James Grainger. It's pretty great, right? And now, we're looking for some new smart, interesting, and interested lovers of all things bookish to contribute to it. Learn more over here, and, if you're interested in applying, send an email to books@torontoist.com. (If you're interested in things other than or in addition to literature and want to contribute to Torontoist's main site, this is what you're looking for.)

If you've got a Facebook account—and because you're in Toronto and are on the internet right now you quite possibly do—commenting on Torontoist just got a bit easier.

The internet, many people like to remark offhand, is killing print. With a twenty-four-hour news cycle better served by the instant response times of broadcast and online outlets (including the online arms of print publications who will run those same stories in the next morning's paper), e-books finally taking off, and shortening attention spans that prize bells and whistles over the sedate pleasures of slow perusal, the old-fashioned printed word is facing hard times. Or so this line of thought goes.

For the duration of Nuit Blanche, Torontoist hosted Blanche Slate, a concurrent projection onto the south-facing wall of the Art Gallery of Ontario and a liveblog updated right here, below. For the whole entire night, we continually threw Nuit Blanche updates—photos and text, from both our contributors and our readers—to the wall, and into this article.

On Nuit Blanche, Torontoist'll be lucky enough to claim a spot on one of the biggest canvases of all: the Art Gallery of Ontario's walls. And we want to share it with you.

We're always looking for new contributors, and we're also always accepting freelance contributions. You know that! But right now we're also very specifically looking for a few good new political contributors to join Torontoist's team and help us ramp up our political coverage in time for next year's municipal election.

This upcoming weekend, Torontoist won't just be covering Nuit Blanche: we—and you, gentle reader, should you so choose—will be part of it. We'll throw more light on our project later this week, but we assure you it'll be worth staying up with us for.

Earlier today, Torontoist co-hosted a live discussion with Globe columnist Marcus Gee. The topic? Mayor David Miller's announcement this morning that he will not be running for re-election. You can replay the discussion below.

It's almost the end of September and fall is all but here, so it's time to have one last go of our patio series. The fifth and final edition of the series—where staff and readers and commenters gather under the late-afternoon sun on the city's finest patios to mingle—shuffles on over to the Village to O'Grady's on Church (518 Church Street). Join us next Tuesday, September 22, starting at 5:30 p.m.

In addition to hosting articles written, photographed, and illustrated by our staff, Torontoist is now accepting submissions from non-staff contributors—freelancers. If you're interested in contributing to Torontoist frequently, you should consider applying to be a regular staff contributor. But if you've got a strong idea for a single post (or two), or you simply can’t or don't want to commit to a quota, freelancing with us is a great way to go. You’ll be held to the same high standards as our regular staff—but you won’t have to worry about continually supplying us with a neverending fountain of brilliance once your article is submitted.

Now finished, our second live discussion co-hosted with the Globe focused on an especially timely topic: cycling in Toronto. For an hour this morning, we fielded your cycling-related questions with Spacing's publisher, Matt Blackett; if you missed it, you can replay the whole conversation below.

For our second live conversation co-hosted with our partners at the Globe and Mail (the first was with architect Donald Schmitt), we're looking at cycling in Toronto, with guest Matt Blackett from Spacing. (And you can probably guess what will be at the forefront of everyone's mind.) Tune back in to Torontoist a bit before 11 a.m. tomorrow—Wednesday—for the live talk, with your questions at the ready.

Apparently we just can't stop giving stuff away. A few weeks ago Torontoist (the site) begat TorontoList (our email newsletter), and TorontoList begat the distribution of free goods across the land. Delivered to your inbox first thing every morning, TorontoList features that day's Urban Planner, the site's most popular posts, the weather forecast, and exciting subscriber-only contests. For instance, right now we're giving out a pair of one-day passes to the Virgin Festival, courtesy of Norwegian electro-rockers Datarock. Sign up below and you'll get today's edition right away, and another one every morning after.

In our first-ever joint live chat with Torontoist partner the Globe and Mail, Donald Schmitt, of Diamond+Schmitt Architects (Museum subway station, the Four Seasons Centre, Jerusalem City Hall), fielded reader questions ranging from the hue of Museum Station to the importance of infrastructure investment. Toronto is "certainly not a pretty place," he said in response to one question, "but it has vitality."

We at Torontoist are big fans of: architecture, urban design, using technology to facilitate interesting conversations, and, of course, Toronto. It is thus with great pleasure that we will be simultaneously co-presenting, along with our partner the Globe and Mail, a live chat with architect Donald Schmitt, of Diamond+Schmitt Architects, at 1:30 p.m. today. (The firm's résumé includes the Four Seasons Centre and the redesigned Museum subway station, which is about as wide a range of styles as we can imagine.) The subject: Toronto architects going global. Local firms are gaining increasing prominence internationally, and we will discuss the whys and wherefores. You can submit questions here on Torontoist once the chat is underway, or if you're an eager beaver, post them in the comments section of the Globe's article here.

The fourth edition of Torontoist's patio series—where staff and readers and commenters gather under the late-afternoon sun on the city's finest patios to mingle—heads east to the Globe Bistro (124 Danforth Avenue, right by Broadview Station). Join us this Wednesday, August 5, starting at 5:30 p.m. We'll see you then!

In addition to looking for a few great new people to contribute to Torontoist, we're also now looking—specifically—for a few early risers to tend to Newsstand, our weekday morning roundup of local news from other outlets across the city.

Starting now, Torontoist is here to help to solve all your civic quandaries with a brand new feature: Ask Torontoist!

Torontoist now has a daily email newsletter: TorontoList! Delivered to your inbox first thing every morning, TorontoList features exciting subscriber-only contests, that day's Urban Planner, the site's most popular posts, the weather forecast, and so much (okay, a bit) more! Sign up below, and you'll get today's edition right away, and another one every morning after.

As promised, the third edition of Torontoist's Patio Series—wherein Torontoist staffers, readers, commenters, friends, frenemies, and fans all gather together under the late-afternoon sun on some of the city's finest patios—is this Wednesday, June 24, from 5:30 p.m. on. Continuing our trend of choosing venues with three and only three syllables in their names (The Central in April, The Beaver in May), Wednesday's meet-up will be at The Pilot, at 22 Cumberland Street—right around the corner from Bloor-Yonge Station for you TTCers. We'll see you on Wednesday!

Torontoist has a brand new mobile version, working as of right now on your favourite fancy mobile device! Just slide on over to torontoist.com (or, failing that, mobile.torontoist.com) and enjoy a tinier and tidier version of Torontoist that's optimized for reading and interacting with on your smaller screen. Direct all your praise for it to our pals at Gothamist, and let us know what you think in the comments of this article.

Torontoist and the Globe and Mail have liked each other so much, for so long, that we've decided to finally make it official. As of Friday night, the Globe now has a brand new Toronto section on their website, and as of Friday night, that hub will regularly and prominently feature selected Torontoist content, part of a content-sharing partnership between the two media organizations.

We're now well into patio season, which you're probably well aware of if you've picked up the latest copy of NOW or Eye, or, you know, been outside. And if you like Torontoist, patios, lazy Wednesday afternoons, and internet friends, boy, do we have the event for you!

Eye is completely, almost annoyingly, obsessed with charts, diagrams, and other math-based minutiae. It's like their thing now! (Well, that, and articles written by Kate Carraway about her personal life.) But that doesn't mean we weren't delighted to open up the paper this morning and see, on the very tip-top of page five, beside their masthead and above their letters, that they'd devised formulas for determining "which websites are essential feeds and which ones are only recycling what you've already read on Yahoo News." It appears that, in Eye's eyes, we are the former! We're "Gawker - Fark - (US Weekly/Stillepost)"; "all the insidery snark that fits." And here we are, writing about it in an insidery and snarky fashion!

Do you use Twitter? Well, surely you're already following Torontoist—and you may have noticed that our updates are now hand-written and way more intelligible, too—but now there's TOistLive, which, from hereon out, will be intermittently live-blogging (live-tweeting?) events that don't warrant full articles on Torontoist proper. Like tonight's Grand Tasting, for instance!

Tags—those things we add to posts to help sort and categorize them—are officially back! They were disabled for a while to help reduce the load on Torontoist's servers, but you can now find them below any and every post, including this one. Use them to stay on top of your favourite topics (badvertising, politics, art, vandals!), your favourite features (like Reel Toronto, Urban Planner, or Historicist), site news, or corrections. You can also subscribe to any and all tags in your RSS reader of choice through the tag page. Oh, and our site search also works way better now—give it a shot from the top left corner of any page on Torontoist.

This past weekend, Torontoist made a few major staff changes official: Marc Lostracco has returned as Torontoist's co-Editor-in-Chief, and Karen Aagaard, Hamutal Dotan, and Jerad Gallinger are Torontoist's three new Associate Editors. Marc served as co-editor (with me) for the length of 2007 and contributed to the site for two years, and I couldn't be happier to have him back, and Karen, Hamutal, and Jerad have all done exemplary work as contributors to (and contributing editors on) Torontoist to this point, and will undoubtedly do a wicked job with their new positions.

Starting Monday, Torontoist is bringing newsstands back.

If you like Torontoist, patios, lazy Wednesday afternoons, and internet friends, boy, do we have the event for you! Later this afternoon, Torontoist is hosting the first edition of a (potentially) recurring summer patio series for our staff and readers, organized by our own Jaime Woo. From 5–7 p.m. tonight, we'll be hanging out at the Central (603 Markham Street). Maybe you're a long-time reader who has longed to befriend our elite squad of contributors; maybe you're a petulant commenter who longs to endlessly argue about street art in person! The possibilities for fun are endless, and the whole thing is totally informal and should be totally fun. It'd be swell to see you at the Central this afternoon.