Eye weekly to be repositioned as weekly city magazine The Grid

Bye, bye Eye

Eye weekly, Torstar's urban weekly, is being rebranded and (as anticipated) relaunched as a city magazine. The renewed publication -- now called The Grid -- will be out on May 12, according to a Twitter announcement by publisher and editor-in-chief Laas Turnbull. 

The repositioning more or less sees the publication vacate the alt entertainment newsweekly and listings field in Toronto to its bigger rival NOW. Eye was originally created to compete head-to-head with NOW. Turnbull told Marketing magazine about the strategic thinking behind the change:

The new handle is not some sort of Tron reference, he said. “It’s actually more descriptive than anything. If you look at a map of the city and take out the background and just emphasize all the roadways—North, South, East and West—it looks like a piece of graph paper. So that notion of looking at the city from a street level and a neighbourhood level is very much the direction we’re going editorially,” said Turnbull, who stepped into his role at the Torstar-owned Eye seven months ago.

The name change is part of a move in a radically different direction for the publication, he continued.

Rather than remain an alternative newsweekly heavy in arts, entertainment and listings, The Grid will essentially be a city magazine for people in their 20s and 30s. “So a younger, hipper, more provocative version of Toronto Life in a weekly guise,” he said.

“We’re pretty excited about it because there’s never been a weekly city magazine for young people in Toronto and we think there’s a real appetite for it,” said Turnbull. He added that Torstar has put a lot of resources into the launch.

“There really hasn’t been a big print and online media brand launch in this town for a long, long time. Dose was probably the last thing that would even approach this scale.”