Newsstand
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.This week, briefly, Newsstand abandons its normal political correctness, behaves badly and is thoroughly demeaning to women. The excuse is that we can no longer ignore the magazine site that has shot to top slot in Yell's weekly Top 30 chart.
As an alternative to watching Match of the Day, the classy-looking site of lads' mag FHM (http://www.erack.com/FHM/ FHMhome.htm) is very, er, stimulating. The spiritual heart of the site is Upfront - basically soft porn, with a bit of drinking-related stuff thrown in for respectability. Elsewhere, you can vote for your favourite mega-babe, and so on.
It's not all porn. The Details section covers fashion, though personally I can't see enough detail in the GIF of the pounds 212 Armani cardigan to know whether it's quite me. There's plenty of interaction - you can submit your favourite chat-up line, bar-room joke or stranger-than-fiction True Story, or your suggestion for the World's Worst Job (this week, Chief Circumcisor at Stafford Clinic).
The links page is brief, selective and more broad-ranging than the site. But FHM's star feature is Position of the Week, demonstrated by a brief, stop-frame animation of Ken and Barbie; readers can submit feedback on how it was for them. At least they don't use Wallace and Gromit.
A week ago, arch-rival Loaded went public with Uploaded (http://www.uploaded.com). It's already pulling heavy traffic, judging by the server's performance (28 bytes/sec is unprecedented on my ISDN line), and it's clearly serious competition - less slick to look at but technically trickier (lots of audio for those with Shockwave), and more brutally laddish in tone. The "swearing archive", composed of readers' submissions, in fact, covers a wide range of slang related to abuse, sex and other bodily functions - and will, in time, doubtless become an invaluable sociological document.
You get a fair idea of Uploaded's preoccupations from the section headings in the links page: games, sport, the Simpsons, movies and Weird Bollocks, for example. (Interestingly, porn and drugs haven't made it from the development site to the public version.) And what does the sport section contain? Golf, footy and Formula One racing.
At the posher end of the boys' market, GQ is a part of Conde Nast's award- winning but not user-friendly site (http://www.condenast.co.uk). GQ gives its soft porn an arty gloss - some bikini shots are in monochrome - and surrounds it with a smokescreen of good material. GQ Daily is compelling: a smartly written mini-journal, combining headline stories with mini-features. The Body and Soul section seems dangerously obsessed with age. The questionnaire to work out life expectancy gave me an answer of 54-73; I bet they say that to all the boys. The feature on 30 things to do before you are 30 will seem a bit tame to the lads at Uploaded. They could submit additions and hope to win a bottle of champagne - except that the competition closed three months ago. Keeping these Web sites up to date is such a chore
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments