What's Hot What's New

The good, the bad and the ugly. You'll find them all here. Each week you'll get my take on the intriguing, and sometimes peculiar, titles to recently hit the newsstand.

Laid Low Cover Price: $5.99 www.laidmag.com Laid Low is a lifestyle magazine featuring hot cars and beautiful women. There is plenty of eye candy to look at in this publication. The publisher claims that Laid Low is a lifestyle magazine that has something for everyone, no matter who they are. That claim is debatable, and Laid Low attempts to combine hip hop, low rider cars and women into one publication and call it a lifestyle magazine. This publication has more to do with the Latino hip hop culture and does not translate well outside of that genre. And with the marketplace full of similar magazines it is doubtful that a publication like this one will stand out enough to survive the carnage at the newsstands, even with the three collector's covers of the first issue.

Heal Cover Price: $4.99 www.healtoday.com With the goal of helping people emerge from the cancer experience come Heal magazine. This publication provides much needed information and inspiration to those suffering from cancer. It, as well as its sister publication Cure, give people living with cancer content they can not find anywhere else. It is unfortunate that cancer cases are growing across the country. Articles on health insurance, vitamins for prevention, and survivor stories give potential consumers the kind of content they need to make it through their cancer experience. Heal, as well as Cure is working to make newsstands and the world a healthier place.   This is the type of magazines that actually brings a ray of hope for the mission of magazines to educate, inform and connect.

MAP www.themapmag.com Covering the Miami music and art can be a daunting task but the people at MAP magazine are attempting to do just that. The publishers at MAP (Music, Art, People) have the goal of being a gathering place where we can all get together. While MAP is certainly a beautiful magazine and has a great feel, but it falls short of being the meeting place for Miami culture that its editors had hoped to create. There has been a multitude of regional publications hitting newsstands. It seems as though every major city has its own publication and they all have the same problem: how different is your magazine from the one next door. MAP magazine provides a lot of information, but fails to have that rhythm that carries the magazine form one page to the other.   Sure, there is a rhythm, but it is so monotonous that it does not offer the readers any surprises to wake them up first and then excite them with the content.   Issue one has a great cover that I hope will be followed up with great content in issue two.