Et Tu, Italic?: The Bold Italic Ceases Operations

Just a day after our hat tip to The Bold Italic's stellar reporting on the closure of longtime Mint Hill fixture the Orbit Room comes news that The Bold Italic, itself, is shutting down.

The site posted this message about 40 minutes ago -- >

Since our launch, The Bold Italic has strived to faithfully serve San Franciscans near and far, whether born and bred here or having just arrived in the city. We have a great passion for the Bay Area and all that it has to offer — and have had a lot of fun sharing our enthusiasm with you. Together we have built a strong community of followers, contributors, and partners. However, we have made the difficult decision to cease operations. It’s been a great run and we supremely thank everyone who has supported us along the way. 

While the news about the Orbit Room gave a lot of us -- particularly those of us with sentimental and/or beverage attachment to the place -- the sads, it wasn't a total surprise; we are getting used to everything we love, especially on the south side of town, shutting down and turning into unaffordable housing geared toward those with money to burn and little affinity for neighborhood joints run by big/odd personalities.

But the closure of a website that had been doing such a lovely job of chronicling these changes does feel like a bit of a shock. It's true that the media landscape in a post-print world is tricky. (See Gigaom.) But we felt that since the Bold Italic mostly exists online, it's not like they were sitting on some piece of hot real estate. The site recently hired a new top editor and just a couple of weeks was actively looking for "Opinionated Writers" to add to its stable.

UPDATE: SFGate has more information on TBI and its closure, including news to us that the site's launch was an "experimental" collaboration between old-media titan Gannett and experiential design studio IDEO.

The piece relies heavily on Michael Maness for quotes. He was the Gannett exec in charge of innovation at the time of TBI's launch. That he is no longer with the company but instead "innovator in residence" at the Harvard Business School could, perhaps, tell you all you need to know about how Gannett feels about media innovation. From the SFGate piece -- >

“It was smart, slightly irreverent, kind of the person that you want to have at the dinner party ... your friend that you depend on to know the next cool thing,” Maness said.

The shutdown may come as a surprise to some. The Bold Italic held a neighborhood event on Divisadero Street just two weeks ago.

But Maness said the news didn’t come as a shock to him: The Bold Italic originally planned to spread to other cities. After six years, it still hadn’t.

“It’s very hard for these types of things,” he said. And, for an experimental site with a large, bottom-line driven media company to answer to, “it’s hard to innovate in those spaces, and that’s part of what the difficulty was with the Bold Italic.”