Why You will struggle on the newsstand

Every time I've been involved in the development of a new magazine the same thing happens. The art director takes an early version of the logo, slaps it on top of a famous face, adds a few cover lines, prints it out and sticks it on the wall. Then we stand around looking at it and pursing our lips until somebody eventually mutters the dreadful truth. "Looks like a colour supplement". With that we all slink back to our drawing boards.

In the world of paid-for magazines the expression "looks like a colour supplement" is the most acid verdict you can hand down. Flicking through the Mail on Sunday's You, which this week launched as a newsstand title, was an opportunity to ponder what is the essential difference between a free magazine and one that is paid for.

According to the managing director of the MoS this new form of distribution represents a long-overdue extension of a previously denied civil right. "We are only allowing someone to buy our product on one day a week," he says. "We are giving people the opportunity to purchase You specifically across seven days."

Well, let me guess what they're saying at Grazia Towers, where they probably see this as a torpedo amidships, or at Vogue, which was surprisingly swift out of its highly engineered pram in pointing out that the interloper's logo was getting too close for comfort. They're saying "look, sweetie, nobody 'buys' your magazine as it is. It is merely one of the things that arrives with your paper. If you think it can survive on the newsstand without its big brother then come on down."

It's to be hoped that the publishers wandered down to WH Smith before making the decision to launch. It's axiomatic that all markets are competitive but over the past few years that part of the magazine market where celebrity, gossip, entertainment, weight loss and real life have all collided in an unholy orgy of hot pink logos, cover prices in starbursts and the latest on who has either lost weight, gained weight or kept their weight roughly the same, has been about as competitive as life gets.

They may have their different take on the facts. The same week that Closer was assuring me that Charlotte Church had partied while her mother was in the rehab clinic, Reveal, er, revealed that she'd actually left the festivities on a, yup, mercy dash to be at mum's side. But to the untrained eye they look and read the same. The fact that titles such as Now have taken to logo-ising their name in the body copy (after the manner of the Sun) suggests they're aware that their readers have to be regularly reminded what they're reading. Richard Desmond's Star carries a flash in the top left corner announcing "55p less than Heat". This is the first case I can remember of a magazine using its competitor's logo on its own cover.

You doesn't indulge in such unseemly fisticuffs. Its design does not seem to have taken account of the central truth of the newsstand - a cover must appeal to a moron in a hurry. In the case of the women's weekly market they are also appealing to a moron in a hurry with no end of choice. In the world of weeklies, qualities like beauty, polish and sophistication are useless. Speed is everything. Vulgarity is a hair away. It's sell-sell-sell and then sell some more. The category exerts its own terrible discipline. Titles that set out with all sorts of self-denying ordinances are usually pole dancing within a few months.

One day a newspaper publisher may successfully float off one of their supplements as a stand-alone. If that happens it will mean that they have developed that highly evolved notion of a reader which is at the centre of the consumer magazine process. This notion is a combination of the person you wish they were and the person the sales figures tells you they actually are. Between these poles comes a workable cliche that should ideally be a little bit different from everybody else's cliche.

The next year will see a shakeout in this market. The ones that go will be the ones that don't have any sense of a reader at all.

· David Hepworth is editorial director of Development Hell Ltd mail@davidhepworth.com

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