Star Media Group‘s August hiring of Laas Turnbull, the former executive vice-president at Brunico Communications and one-time editor of The Globe and Mail‘s ROB Magazine, as editor and publisher Eye Weekly magazine likely raised a few eyebrows in Candian media circles.
Why would an editor and media executive steeped in national business and technology publishing want to join Toronto’s decades-old, alt-weekly race dominated by Eye and Now?
The answer lies in what Turnbull said is parent company Torstar‘s plans and ambitions of the publication.
“The brand and the audience are very important to Torstar on a corporate level,” said Turnbull. “Consequently there’s a huge amount of support for making some changes to make it more successful. It’s not often you get a chance to reinvent something, particularly something as appealing as a city magazine for 18- to 40-year-olds.”
The magazine, which reports a weekly readership of 213,000, is preparing for a complete redesign to be unveiled next spring, before which every aspect of Eye‘s business will change, Turnbull said.
“It’s not just how the paper and website look, but everything from sales and marketing to distribution to just our broad strategic outlook,” said Turnbull.
Turnbull has begun making some of those changes, particularly in staffing. He recently recruited former colleague and ROB associate editor David Fielding as Eye‘s senior editor. And according to Turnbull, there’s a lot more to come.
“We’ve hired a director of sales, a deputy editor and a senior editor, and we’ll definitely be hiring more people, especially on the editorial side as we get deeper into the fall,” he said. “It’s a nice story–reinvesting instead of cutting–which has been the trend across publishing for the last few years. We’re understaffed at the moment. There’s no way we’re able to put this thing out every week and go through a process of change and produce something week-to-week that’s provocative and smart and compelling without having more people.”
The goal for Eye‘s spring relaunch is to create a city magazine that doesn’t adhere to the usual alt-weekly tropes of what Turnbull calls “knee-jerk political reaction” and predictable stances on a lot of issues.
Turnbull was tight-lipped about the redesign, but he said readers can expect incremental changes from now until next spring, such as the art direction of this week’s cover featuring a type-heavy design decrying the prospect of victory by Toronto mayoral candidate Rob Ford, which Turnbull said is “something markedly different from anything we’ve ever done.”
“I’m interested in something that’s smart, open-minded, compelling and provocative,” he said. “We collectively made the decision here that we’re going to try and be as innovative as possible. I think what that means is we’re going to be unafraid to make mistakes, we’re going to take chances and we’re going to [screw up] occasionally. But I’m hoping that being fearless and taking those chances will really set us apart and grab people’s attention.”
In terms of serving advertisers, Turnbull aims to make Eye Weekly the standard for clients hoping to reach young, sophisticated urbanites.
“The goal is for this to become the youth brand in the city,” he said. “I think it’ll be exiting and open up a whole range of possibilities for advertisers who want to work with us because our goal is to be as creative on the sales side as we are on the editorial side.”
