City Limits, a nonprofit community service magazine, will scrap its print edition after 36 years and move to a strictly online publication.
The magazine has also acquired the Bronx News Network brand, a local news website run by the Mosholu Preservation Corp., which is a nonprofit real-estate developer.
No money was exchanged in the deal.
City Limits said it plans to revamp and restart BNN.com, which has not been updated in eight months.
With a circulation of about 10,000, City Limits made the decision to go all-digital because the cost of operating a print publication became overwhelming.
“We saw the numbers, and the numbers of the digital side were growing fairly steadily,” said Jarrett Murphy, editor of City Limits and now a director at BNN.
“The magazine simply wasn’t growing,” he said. “We had to make a choice of which basket to put our eggs in.”
Owned by the Community Service Society of New York, City Limits has an endowment of $700,000 and employs a staff of three.
“Saving money pays for a lot of stories,” Murphy said.
Mosholu Preservation Corp., BNN’s former owner, was founded in 1981 as a “buyer of last resort” for burnt-out Bronx properties by a collection of the borough’s community organizations and institutions.
MPC has also operated the Norwood News since 1988, but BNN turned out to be more than the nonprofit could handle.
“We’re not in the business of generating numerous papers. They cost a lot of money to produce,” said Roberto Garcia, executive director of MPC.
“Instead of it going to waste, we transferred the ownership over to City Limits,” Garcia said.
BNN joins City Limits’ other community news site, the Brooklyn Bureau.