Weekly magazine The Grid sent out a tweet this morning announcing the closure of its publication.  Since May 2011, it covered all things Toronto and on Thursday, the Torstar Corp.-owned magazine will come to an end.

Editor Lianne George started at the company in September 2010 when the publication was called Eye Weekly. She said she would always be grateful for the creative freedom she had while working at The Grid.

“We had a remarkable opportunity to make the city magazine we’d always wanted to read,” she said. “We tried to do that in a spirit of curiosity, humour, and optimism. There was so much happening in the city around food and drink, real estate, and city building when we launched. City Hall was like a circus. Editorially, it was a great time to be starting something new in Toronto.”

George said the editorial team is one of the most talented in Canada and thanks to the efforts of Vanessa Wyse and her team of designers, the publication won SND’s Best-Designed Newspaper in the World for three consecutive years.  

Although George is sad to see the staff go, she’s optimistic that the young team will find new opportunities in the near future. She said the closure of The Grid was not due to its lack of popularity, but the challenging media climate and bad timing.

“Even three years in, we’re still basically a start-up. Nobody anticipated the pace at which print advertising would dry up in the past few years,” she said. “When advertising budgets shrink, the money tends to go to known commodities, not to young media brands like ours.”