Dese and dem and Dose

With a thud, the new "daily magazine", Dose, has landed. And it underwhelms. The publication manages to be busy, but strangely empty, bright and colourful, but somehow dull, new but already feeling tired.

Where you might expect a premier issue to be setting the standard for the vibrant daily to come, particularly after a runup of months, instead there is a blizzard of staff-written non sequiters. Created for a youthful audience, Dose's story selection is not at all edgy, but a mishmash, jammed into a very conventional layout. It looks like a "young person's" newspaper produced by an "old person's" publishing company. Which, when you think of it, is exactly what it is. Metro is a hipper paper, and it doesn't even try to be.

The first issue of Dose is dominated by stories about the Pope's death and his significance to young people. This has led the editors to the odd decision to dominate every page of the first issue with running quotes from the Pope, some of them not directly attributed. On page 7 (if you can find the page numbers, which are so small as to be invisible) the readers has the peculiar experience of having the juxtaposition of one of these "Pope-tickers" reading "Open wide the doors to Christ", beneath which is a completely pointless story about an upsurge in the birth of right whales in captivity.

There are simply puzzling uses of otherwise precious space -- including the half page on Page 22 that has a weird and silly graphic about...who knows? and the centrespread of unreadable little balloons with banal messages from unknown people. The sexy advice from strangers is neither sexy nor strange. The graphic on page 3 about life stress is nonsensical "chartjunk", failing to communicate any useful information. The photographs are tiny and pointless. Potential readers will, of course, be thrilled that Dose will deliver their horoscope to their mobile phone. (I can hear the needle on their so-what meter being buried in the red zone.)

Of course it's understandable that the first issue of any new publication tends to be over-studied, over art-directed, over-done and overwrought; it will be only fair to give a gander at a couple of weeks' issues to see how it settles in to the regular business of serving its intended 18 to 34 readership . However, judging by the 20 bundles of Dose #1 (maybe 2,500 copies) stacked up uncut, unnoticed and resolutely untaken by streams of Ryerson students (ed. note: shurely Dose's demographic?) at the corner of Victoria and Gould Streets, one has to wonder how much of a need is being served here. It wasn't being snapped up by its readers and, at a glance, neither is it having to beat off advertisers with a stick.