Last spring Torontonians saw Eye Weekly boxes disappear across the city. Although they had sat side-by-side with rival NOW Magazine for two decades, Star Media Group (owners of Eye) decided it was time for a change. In May 2011, named after the layout of the city, a fully rebranded publication was unveiled and The Grid was born.
Despite a circulation of over 200,000 at the time of the shift, the popularity of Eye Weekly never could quite surpass that of its lead competitor, NOW Magazine. NOW's circulation sits at about 350,000.
Laas Turnbull took on the position as the publisher and editor-in-chief at the alt-weekly in August 2010 after Toronto Star publisher John Cruickshank approached him. “Eye Weekly was not working as a business and John said to me, 'Figure it out,'” Turnbull told me.
This isn’t the first time that Turnbull has been put in charge of a big transformation. When he took over as editor-in-chief at the Globe and Mail's Report on Business in 2003, he completely changed the editorial vision.
Turnbull installed an unapologetically Bay Street-centred perspective. He wanted to focus on the most important players in Canadian business rather than run how-to columns on small-time investment.
“You're talking about huge egos, a-type personalities, intensive competition, and people trying to beat the shit out of each other,” he said. “The stakes are really high. So rather than talking about the dollars and cents, [I thought] let's try to tap into that drama.”
It was time for the Eye Weekly tenure to end for many reasons, according to Cruickshank. “I didn't like that we relied on adult classifieds for our business case,” he said. “And I didn't feel that the editorial was particularly distinguished. I also didn't feel that we were competing successfully with NOW Magazine - Eye's sense of mission was too similar to that of NOW.”
Turnbull agreed: “It doesn't make sense in a city of this size to have two alternative newsweeklies,” he said.
James Adams is the columnist behind the Globe and Mail's “On the Stand: A weekly roundup of the best magazine reads”. Things needed to change or Eye Weekly would have continued to come in second, he said.
“Eye was always the weak sister to the NOW machine,” Adams told me. “Just in terms of page count and ads, it never ever could come close to NOW. NOW's enduring appeal is its listings, it's comprehensiveness of the live culture scene. Eye was never really able to eclipse NOW in that.”
After taking the helm at The Grid, Turnbull thought about where it would fit in the bigger picture. “I wanted to look at the wider scope of what was happening in the publishing scene here and figure out where the sweet spot was going to be,” he said. “And not just the editorial sweet spot – there needed to be a business case that ties into it too.”
That sweet spot is where The Grid has looked to put down its roots.
The new publication was given a complete makeover, with even the size of the paper growing two inches in height. Cruickshank and Turnbull decided they wanted to move away from the alt-weekly and put their efforts into creating a city magazine with a whole new structure.
For Cruickshank, alternative newspapers were useful in the 1960s because it served as an outlet for people to express their countercultural beliefs. “These publications were valuable at one point because they had someone to fight,” he said. “But now there is no authority figure to fight.”
Turnbull saw a gap out there for people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s looking for a city perspective. “This is an example of recognizing a deficiency in the market and responding to it and really trying to carve out a space for ourselves that really has never existed before in Toronto,” he said.
More than changing the style of publication and the paper itself, The Grid also changed its editorial voice by intentionally keeping snark out.
“There's a real lack of cynicism in what we do which I think is really refreshing,” Turnbull said. “I hate little flourishes in a lot of writing that is just snarky. It's not informational, it's not constructive, it's not descriptive, it's just being bitchy.”
Taking the adult classifieds out of the back of the book is another thing Cruickshank and Turnbull said was essential for the rebranding.
But Adams wondered how this would affect their revenue: “It's a tough world out there for advertising right now,” he said. “They have, at least superficially, taken a hit on ad revenue by opting to take out those adult classifieds and become a city-oriented weekly Toronto Life-type magazine.”
Instead of relying on money from adult classifieds, Turnbull said they're aiming to maintain advertising relationships with bigger corporate brands. “One of the reasons we took the adult stuff out of the back was because we knew that RBC was never going to book an ad with us if we've got that shit in our magazine,” he said. “Same with a lot of the car companies. The adult stuff was just icky. [Corporate advertising] is really where we see ourselves growing and that’s a massive differentiation from NOW Magazine.”
Cruickshank was less worried about revenue and more concerned about the ethics of the situation. “For me the most important thing is I feel a whole lot better that I'm not running a magazine that has a significant piece of its business model involved with prostitution ads,” he said. “I think they're fundamentally exploitative.”
When it comes to piecing the paper together each week, design and visuals play an important role. In three words, Turnbull described The Grid as "visual, open-minded, and highly packaged."
Adams said he is impressed with the overall look of it. “The graphs and imagery are not something you just slap together,” he said. “There is a kind of magazine sensibility to this presentation. It's a pretty classy tabloid.”
As for whether or not The Grid can be labelled "a success," Cruickshank, Turnbull, and Adams all agree that it is especially difficult to measure how the public has received a new publication. “You do something one year and people maybe notice the next year,” Cruickshank said.
But Turnbull insists that overall he has been pleasantly surprised by how the city has reacted to the new version of Eye Weekly. “The criticism was a whisper and I expected it to be a roar,” he said. “The media culture here doesn't support itself. The media tries to eat itself here. There's a lot of sniping and grousing and just a general lack of support for what other people are doing. And for whatever reason this hasn't ruffled people's feathers too much.”
Some research from Angus Reid done prior to The Grid launch, and eight weeks following it showed positive results.The average age of readers for Eye was 37. But eight weeks after the launch, readership within the 18-24 demographic had risen from 39 per cent to 51 per cent. Also, the numbers of readers per copy rose from two to three.
Although The Grid’s critics have remained quiet for the most part, Adams can find a few areas for improvement in the magazine. “They can get a little too involved and clever with the graphic presentation and their charts and grids and stuff,” he said. “Sometimes it becomes hard to interpret and I think one of the great advantages of graphics and charts is the simplicity they can provide in terms of conveying information rather than complexifying it.”
This isn’t the first criticism The Grid has received. In June, the magazine published “Dawn of a new gay” written by a man speaking about the experience of post-modern homosexuals in the city. Several media outlets expressed outrage that one person could speak on the behalf of such a large and varied group. Different reactions came out across the Toronto media, including a negative piece by one of the men featured in the cover story.
Despite the initial bad press, Turnbull said it wasn't a mistake to run the story. “Really, it put us on the map,” he said. “It was a gift. It was the best thing we ever did.”
And what of the future for the paper? Cruickshank, sees it sticking around because it has filled a space in the city's media that was vacant before. “It’s going out there and trying to engage people who haven't had a publication in town that's tried to have this sort of conversation," he sad. "And I think on that basis, it has a very long life ahead of it.”
*Note: I interned at The Grid in the summer of 2010 and chose this as my topic for a J-school case study.
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