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.

Healthier You Cover Price: $5.95 www.healthieryou.com At $5.95, Healthier You magazine is the most expensive company ad I have ever read! Healthier You does have a noble charge: to explore technologies and innovations that enable us to live healthier lives. Unfortunately they fall short in their attempt, and relegate themselves to being nothing more than a promotional mouthpiece for EcoQuest International. How can Healthier You claim to have the best interest of its reader's in mind when they are simultaneously featuring one company's product per issue? Healthier You has a clean look and design but reads more like a company brochure you'd find in a doctor's office waiting room than a magazine.

MXI Cover Price:$3.99 www.mximag.com MXI magazine focuses on the motocross circuit which is definitely a niche audience. The design of the magazine will not leave you breathless although maybe the images in the magazine will. But the magazine offers nothing new that you don't already see in other similar publications. What will ultimately make or break this magazine is the content. Will the content in MXI be of quality enough to keep an audience? Looking at the inaugural issue I have my doubts whether this magazine will be able to capture and sustain an audience. The articles in MXI lack real substantive information, even for such a niche audience.

Passage www.newmanmag.com Passage magazine hopes to capture the young male Christian audience that is too young for its parent magazine New Man. Found on the flip side of its parent publication, Passage is easily transferred from the hands of a father to the hands of his son. Passage has the goal of aiding young males through their journey into manhood. Many magazines have tried to capture the young male audience with little to no success. What Passage has going for it is that unlike many of the other magazines, it has effectively tailored its design for that audience. By boldly stating itself as a Christian magazine, Passage takes advantage of an increasing niche market of young Christian males. The content definitely promotes a moral agenda that may be too preachy for some, but for the intended audience New Man has found the correct passage for success.