SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 19, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Following a fifteen-and-a-half month hiatus and a change in ownership, popular Bay Area news and culture site SFist comes back online today at 8 a.m. Writers Jay Barmann and Joe Kukura are both happily returning, and the site will resume chronicling San Francisco life through curated and originally written content.
"It's not every day that we get to bring back the dead, but today that's happening for SFist," says former Editor-in-Chief Jay Barmann. "And it's not every day that I get to help perform the CPR that revives the patient just when we thought she was for-real lost."
Launched in 2004 in the heyday of the blog boom, SFist evolved and matured over thirteen years into a morning touchstone for San Franciscans that told the daily story of San Francisco life, sometimes with great seriousness but more often with humor. At its peak, SFist had over 3.5 million pageviews and 1 million unique readers every month.
SFist's daily array always included breaking and local news, as well as sports, weather, tech, business, arts and culture, and the revived SFist will continue covering all of those things — with a bit more regular sports coverage thrown in.
New owners Impress3 Media and its CEO Zachary Chen are committed to nursing SFist back to health, and to reinvigorating a vital news source and unique voice in the local media universe.
"As a San Francisco native and longtime reader of SFist, I was just as dismayed and sad as everyone here when the site went offline," says Chen. "And when the opportunity arose last year to acquire its assets, I saw a perfect opportunity to give something back to the city and revive a beloved source of local news."
Chen also looks forward to harnessing Impress3 Media's proprietary machine-learning technology to aid in the speed and efficiency of identifying and sourcing breaking news content — but, he says, all content on SFist will continue to be written, edited, and curated by its writers.
Impress3 Media is a growing presence in digital content production and distribution based in San Francisco. A subsidiary of Impressions Holdings, Impress3 Media has appeared in the pages of Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Bloomberg, and Inc. magazine named it the #20 fastest growing software company of 2017.
Initially part of the five-city Gothamist network, SFist and its former sister sites were shut down by recent acquirer DNA Info / New Media News LLC in November 2017. All of Gothamist's content assets were subsequently sold at auction to New York Public Radio, and Gothamist.com has since come back online with some of its original staff. Impress3 Media completed its acquisition of SFist's assets in January 2019 in order to bolster its mission to revive the struggling local news industry.
In addition to some new local sports coverage, readers can expect new features to be added over time, as well as a newly revived Instagram.com @sfist. SFist's Facebook and Twitter accounts also come back online today, as does the SFist daily newsletter. There will also be returning favorite columns like Apartment Sadness and This Week in SF Food.
"We're curators and connoisseurs who occasionally do some reporting, and we know this town up, down and sideways," Barmann says. "We're happy to be back joining you on your commutes and lunch hours."
SOURCE SFist.com
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