The birth of The Grid

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.  

Grey Cup anthem penned by Toronto songwriter Donovan Woods

Toronto songwriter Donovan Woods wrote a song based on his dad's envy for his cousin's football ring. 

That song ("My Cousin Has a Grey Cup Ring") has become an unlikely Canadian football anthem. 

Now Donovan's dad sends him a constant flow of e-mails with interesting newspaper clippings hoping to inspire him to write more songs. 

"He’s still working hard to inspire other songs," Donovan told me. "Every day he'll send me scanned articles from the newspaper. And I say ‘Dad, you can find online versions of all these news articles.' But he still cuts them out and scans them. It’s kind of nice. It’s nice to get a big ol' file in your inbox."

Although most sports anthems are usually upbeat tracks, this song has a bit of a melancholy tinge. 

"It’s a song about feeling inadequate," Donovan explained. "For me, anyway, my favourite folk songs are wistful songs that say, ‘Yeah you’re inadequate but it’s going to be okay.’"

Read the full article here, at thedailyplanet.com. 

The shoe tree: One of nature's greatest mysteries

This shoe tree was discovered in a small town in the countryside of south-western Ontario. How can it be, that a tree produces shoes as its fruit? We will never know. And maybe we were never meant to. 

Court hears testimony in second-degree murder trial

The jury heard testimony from three witnesses at the second-degree murder trial of Humber student Nahor Araya Monday. The testimonies came from three men who were at Buttonwood Park on Oct. 3, 2008 when Boris Cikovic, 17, was shot.

The court has heard that Cikovic allegedly defended himself with an electrical stunning device before he was fatally shot in the abdomen by the suspect. Three men allegedly tried to rob the victim of his backpack before things escalated.

Nathan Azzopardi told the court that he was one of the first to come to the aid of Cikovic after he was gunned down.

“All I heard was two shots ring out and I ran,” Azzopardi testified. “Then I saw Boris on the ground and I had my hand on the bullet wound. After that he started going into shock.”

The court heard that after the shooting, three black males were seen walking away into a grassy area near the tennis courts at the park.

Defence attorney Stacey Nichols asked Azzopardi about some discrepancies between the statement he gave police the night of the shooting versus what he testified in court. In his statement, he told police that he saw Cikovic take out a tazer and shock one of the suspects. In court, Azzopardi said that he did not see the electric shock device at any time. “I never saw him use it with my own eyes,” he said.

Azzopardi said he remembers what he saw the night of the shooting. “I remember what I've seen,” he told the court. “My mind was everywhere that night. I just watched my best friend get shot. He pretty much died in my arms.”

Aaron Stirtzinger-Bell, 19, was the second witness to testify Monday. He told the court that he only knew one of the teens drinking in the park that night and did not see Cikovic get shot. As he left the courtroom, Stirtzinger-Bell shook the hands of Davorin and Vesna Cikovic, parents of the slain teen, and was given a hug and a kiss on the cheek by Vesna Cikovik.

The third witness was Nikola Kilibarda, 19, who will continue his testimony Tuesday.

Araya, 21, is a third-year arts student at Humber College and is the only person charged in the murder. Crown attorney Patrick Travers told the court that Araya did not pull the trigger, but is just as guilty for his involvement in the fatal botched robbery.

iPhone 4S causes long line-ups across GTA

Check out this report I did along with Kelly Hall for Humber News on the release of the new iPhone. 

Bill Cunningham New York: A review from Toronto

At some points Bill Cunningham New York is a terrifying film.

Surprising, yes. But watching a frail Cunningham weave in and out of New York traffic on his rickety bike nearly pushes this film into the action genre – it's that nerve-racking to watch. At one point he even crashes into a taxi.

But in between the small heart attacks I suffered while watching him careen between cabs and trucks, I must admit I really enjoyed watching this film. The story looks at the work of Cunningham, who has famously documented New York street-style fashion from his bicycle since the 1960s. We see that he lives in near-poverty in one of the last residences for artists in Carnegie Hall where he sleeps on his bed resting atop stacks of old magazines and boxed negatives. For the New York Times, Cunningham spends his days photographing fashion on the streets and his evenings capturing the rich and famous at charity events.

We learn that he has spent his career with a steadfast loyalty to his personal set of ethics. The inclusion of his work in a column that made fun of women for what they wore without his knowledge influenced Cunningham for the rest of his career. From that point forward, he decided to never accept money for his work. “If you don't take their money, they can't tell you what to do,” he said. “Money is the cheapest thing. Liberty and freedom is the most expensive.”

His desire to maintain his freedom is impressive, but extreme. When he takes pictures at charity functions, he refuses to even accept a glass of water because of his principles.

MTV's Vice Guide to Everything: aka the death of Vice's street cred

When the show “The Vice Guide to Everything” premiered on MTV this fall, I was surprised and intrigued. What was a brand like Vice, the self-proclaimed authority on hip culture, doing on a network like MTV, which also features shows like “I Used to be Fat” and “Teen Mom”?


According to the intro of the show, when Vice Magazine started all they cared about was “sex, drugs, and rock n roll.” But, as time marched on, and trucker hats lost their street cred, it seems Vice has changed their ways: “As we traveled around the world, we got more into news, politics, fashion, art, the environment – basically everything,” the narrator proclaims.


The show started off as videos for the web-based channel vbs.tv (Vice broadcasting system) and is about maverick journalists exposing all the crazy things that mainstream media is supposedly afraid to talk about. The show “chronicle[s] the absurdity of the modern condition,” Shane Smith, a co-founder of the magazine and host of the show, told the National Post last month. “But a lot of the different pieces are sort of political in their own way,” he said.


So now the online viewer can watch these episodes, and learn about everything from Russian mobsters who produce television shows about their mobster antics to fashionable bulletproof clothing designers in Colombia, just one click away from seeing “The Hills’” Lauren Conrad tell Heidi Montag she wants to forgive her and forget her. In its infancy, the magazine meant something to an underground culture. But what has become of Vice, a brand that gained notoriety for satirizing the core values of the very network that now hosts its show?