A week ago today, DCist editor-in-chief Aaron Morrissey announced he's stepping down at the end of this month, writing, "I'll be working on a couple independent projects in the immediate future, but have no plans to flee the District of Columbia and will certainly be around." Asked a few days later about the nature of those projects, he confessed, "I think that was, basically, a fancy way of saying that nothing’s really been decided yet." That is, he's leaving his job not for something else, but because he wants to leave his job.

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The timing is interesting. On Sept. 1, Morrissey introduced Martin Austermuhle as associate editor, upping the site's full-time staff to two. And just three weeks ago, DCist announced that, as part of a network-wide move by Gothamist, the site would begin carrying non-local stories from its sister sites — a decision that caused some grumbling among regular readers. I can't be the only person who wondered if these changes had something to do with Morrissey's departure.

It turns out they did, but only slightly, and not in any scandalous way. Overseeing Austermuhle and posting stories from other -ists were simply two more tasks facing an already overburdened Morrissey. A job like this has a shelf life, he told me, and after almost a year and a half cutting a "pretty intense" pace, he's burned out.

"Definitely a part of it was, I'm tired, but the other half of it was, professionally, it was the right time for me to make a move,” he said. "It's easy to burn out, and I think anybody who does that kind of work will tell you the same thing. I think recently we've been trying to do some original reporting, which is great, but the way that the business model is set up, honestly I sometimes felt like, from a personal perspective, I was stretched in a lot of ways.”

Morrissey said he's "not against any" of the decisions Gothamist has made during his tenure, including the latest one to syndicate certain stories. He defended the strategy by saying it "can free up resources." For instance, he said, every -ist wrote its own response to Steve Jobs' death, but now one article can serve the entire network, saving 20 minutes that can be spent writing something else — something local, preferably. (While reducing redundancy factored into the decision, the "main goal was to spice up the content offering on all of our sites," Gothamist publisher and co-founder Jake Dobkin said in an email. He also "thought that it might add 10 or 20% to the traffic of the sites over time.")

"I wouldn't say it played a factor into me necessarily saying, 'This is the time for me to go,'" Morrissey said. "It definitely was a new task I was going to have to take on, just from a workflow kind of perspective. That kind of coordination with other sites, and developing stories of national relevance, was something else I was going to have to do.” Austermuhle, meanwhile, was hired "to bolster our original reporting portfolio ... and he’s delivered on that," he said. "It was good. I've liked working with Martin, and editing him. But it was another job for me to do.”

He's comforted that Austermuhle is a full-time staffer now, because "at least now there’s a contingency in place. I know we're going to find someone, but just in case.” As for Morrissey, he plans to take a few weeks off in December, and said he's not worried about finding a new job. "There are things in the hopper," he told me last week. "I can't really talk about it right now. I'm not going anywhere."

In his email to me this morning, though, Dobkin said Morrissey has "been offered another job by one of our MSM competitors." I emailed Morrissey for details, but he would only say, "I'm still not in a position to talk about particulars regarding my job situation, but I have spoken with various people about what my next move will be. As was the case on Friday when we spoke, I still haven't made a decision, and I'm still examining several different opportunities."

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