This week sees the launch of EX magazine, billed as a style magazine for 18-34 year olds.
Whilst the magazine ostensibly covers music, the club scene, TV, film and fashion, there is really very little in it that is not in some way (often gratuitously) related to sex. The front cover proclaims the magazine as “Sexy” and carries an 18-rated symbol, guaranteed to intrigue browsers in the newsagent.
A brief look inside at the contents, however, reveals a dearth of meaty articles, whole pages taken up with poor-quality pictures of a new band or celebrity, together with a brusque paragraph of biography, entirely out of any context.
The whole magazine seems to have been thrown together using a few photographs and old features that someone found lying around in their shed. Some of the print is impossible to read, and, despite the glossy cover, the inside is lurid and the paper flimsy.
Random snippets on new films and records (with two-or three line reviews which are less than useless to anyone who really wants to know) fill up the last few pages of the magazine. Much of the writing is actually quite good, often sharp and pithy, but is pared down to a bare minimum, whilst whole pages are given over to a headline or a senseless picture.
A few arty nude photographs rub shoulders with ads for rubber-wear and an interview with Miss Whiplash. Indistinct and largely unidentified fashion spreads seem unjustified space fillers.
Indeed, one gets the impression that it was hard work to fill the magazine’s 52 pages, particularly given that advert- ising is almost non-existent. At £2.75 there seems little hope of the magazine taking off unless it can boost the content/design of its editorial.
