One more bundle of newsprint we don't need

It's called Dose. It's a daily flyer paper affiliated with the National Post which also has outlets in Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, and Edmonton. It's geared towards the 18 to 34 crowd, and looks a lot like eye or Now. Today is its third day on the streets.

Dose's design tries to be fresh, using mostly stylish sans-serif fonts and grey scale boxes to separate stories and sections. But the content on each page is so dense and blocky, it's hard to tell where one story begins and another ends.

As for content, Dose's identity is "offspring of 24 Hours/Metro after a group orgy with eye/Now." I imagine the "word gurus" pulled fresh out of Journalism school were probably directed to spin out as much snappy Salon-ish content as possible in as few words as possible so that a college freshman with a 60% average out of high school can sound really smart in front of his buddies.

One of the najor problems is that the one-liners at the top of each page try to tie a whole story together, but they end up making no sense, and frequently go off topic. For example, this Apr. 6 edition's theme was "No one can keep a secret." The paper has stoies here and there about secrets, keeping them, what's not a secret, publication bans, etc. But it does it in such a condensed way it reads like a drunk sporadically ranting about his favourite topic while also talking about his wife until he pukes all over the pages.

The paper is replete with factoids and condensed features whose topics - though intriguing and not quite run-of-the-mill daily news material - really need much more than 250 words.

For example, an article about the use of biogas technology in Uganda went on long enough to explain how it workedand where it was "successfully" in use. But it didn't bother to explain why the hell we're not using it here.

Of course, this Coles-notes feature style is where Dose is likely to shine. Their target readership doesn't have time to read a whole article about anything important - they've got to finish reading King Lear or The Last of the Mohicans by next Thursday! And with it's sleek, urban, I-also-own-an-iPod slim design, it makes an excellent alternative to its bulky sires, eye and Now. Its the perfect thing to take with you to Tim Hortons and leave on the bus.

At this stage, I can't say I welcome yet another flimsy daily that will clutter up the recycling box and fill our drinking water with more runoff from the pulp and paper mill. Hell, I work at a magazine, and we probably kill at least one tree everyday. The only good thing about this paper so far is that the National Post has removed many of its rarely-filled, beaten-up distribution boxes to make room for the shiny new black-red-and-white Dose boxes. (There's a moratorium from the city right now that's restriciting any new publication boxes on the sidewalks.)

Sorry, didn't mean to go on so long about this, but if you're reading this last line, it probably means you skipped everything in between. (See? I was right about people not wanting to read about anything important!)