WHAT ARE the top 10 foods that cannot be improved with cheese? If this instantly has you wondering whether Wensleydale would do more harm to a knickerbocker glory than to sweet and sour pork, a certain Dundonian publishing veteran believes he has just the magazine for you.

Former FHM editor Mike Soutar is launching ShortList, a weekly magazine for young men with money to spend, built around the male obsession with making lists of anything and everything, this Thursday.

Unlike most high-profile magazine launches, however, ShortList is the latest in a growing band of free titles, with over 500,000 copies being handed out around the country, up to 80,000 of them on the streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Hinting at lists on everything from the best Mafia flicks to the all-time greatest snacks once the title starts rolling, Soutar says: "When men get together, they very quickly start ranking and comparing things. It's a core part of how they communicate."

He is at pains to point out, however, that there will be much more than lists to ShortList. "They will form the backbone of the magazine and also the web offering, but a magazine with page after page of lists would be very dull," he says.

Readers will be offered a blokey range of consumer-led news, features, sport, fashion, business and motoring. In a style that recalls such magazines as the late Jack, ShortList will include short snippets for reading on the train and longer reads intended to be worth keeping in your bag until later on.

It will be badged up with a poster-style front cover devoted to just one item, taking advantage of the fact that it does not need to capture readers' attention at the newsstands by shouting about everything inside.

Last week's "Issue Zero", some of the content from which will go into the launch edition, pictured Bill Gates on the cover with the question, "What makes a man ultra-rich?"

This pointed to a feature looking at the qualities that made billionaires of the former Microsoft chief executive, Richard Branson, Bernie Ecclestone and Donald Trump. Other features included a piece on "dark tourism", the trend towards visiting war zones on holiday; a look at Armani's snowboard clothing range; and a Q&A with Fast Show veterans Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson.

As for news, instead of following the usual agenda, stories included Maggie Gyllenhaal's appointment as the face of Agent Provocateur and a jetpack being for sale for £100,000.

The website, which will also launch this week, will include a digital version of the title but also extra daily additions of news and other items. The thing that Soutar is hoping will really make the site take off, however, is Your List.

In line with the vogue for social networking, Your List will enable men to build their own profile and define themselves with a set of lists. They can then link to other men with similar lists and interests and message one another.

So keen is Soutar on lists that he even has a top three reasons why the magazine was named ShortList in the first place. Perhaps inevitably, the top spot goes to the suggestion of lists contained in the title.

"We are not the first people to notice men's obsession with lists. It's why we have the FHM 100 Sexiest Women, the Sunday Times Rich List, the Channel 4 100 Greatest dot dot dot," says Soutar, who started his career as a trainee journalist at DC Thomson before getting his big break as editor of Smash Hits while still in his early 20s.

The two runner-up reasons for the ShortList name are that it had no negative connotations at the focus groups and that it sounds different from anything else at the newsstands.

"It's definitely not Nuts," he says, pointing to one of ShortList's most vital selling points.

He believes that the so-called lads' mags have all become so salacious since the days when he was running them that a gap in the market has been created.

In his view the rot set in when Emap's Zoo responded to the supremacy of Nuts, whose launch Soutar oversaw as IPC's magazine development director, by carrying more and more lewd pictures of women.

When Nuts moved further fleshwards to compete, it dragged monthlies such as FHM, Maxim and Loaded along with it. Soon there were mobile phone pictures of readers' girlfriends in almost every title.

As Alex Randall, head of press at media buyer Vizeum, puts it: "If you want to get into conversations about nipple counts, they have definitely gone up. These titles have become difficult to read on public transport."

This may have gained teenage readers, but older men and certain advertisers walked away, to the extent that Soutar says that only titles such as GQ and Arena are serving upwardly mobile men aged between 18 and 35.

The title, which seems pitched at an audience a notch below GQ, is being published through new investment vehicle ShortList Media. Soutar is chief executive of the company and long-time colleague Phil Hilton the editorial director. Hilton, who will have an editorial staff of 15, deputised for Soutar at FHM and reported to him as launch editor of Nuts.

The heavyweight City backing comes from David Arculus, the former Emap chairman, who seems set to chair the new venture. Finance comes from French Connection founder Stephen Marks, film company Marv Partners, hedge fund GLG Partners and - surprise, surprise - DC Thomson.

Soutar laughs at the suggestion that the magazine is being kept out of Dundee and Aberdeen at the behest of his former employers, who might have reason to fear the extra competition.

"One of the reasons DC Thomson is attracted to this is that it's entirely different in every way to what they currently publish. As a company, they have a very forward-looking view of what's emerging," he says.

With newspapers - and more recently, magazines - losing sales thanks to a generation of young internet users not used to paying for things, there has been an explosion of free titles vying for their time worldwide.

The received wisdom was that only publications light on original content, such as Metro, would succeed free, but that has been blown apart with the likes of City AM, the weekly Sport magazine in London and Scotland's Record PM.

Sport, which targets the same upmarket young men with just over 320,000 copies every Friday and has reached break even in just a few months, will have been particularly useful for persuading ShortList's backers to part with their money.

With ShortList equally dependent on advertisers to pay all of its bills, the big question is whether they will be impressed enough to commit to the product. Soutar says the initial response has "exceeded expectations", but media buyers suggest it has been more mixed.

On the one hand, Alex Randall says ShortList has been welcomed as a potential addition for campaigns aimed at young men that buy space in such titles as Sport, Observer Sport Monthly and the Mail on Sunday's Live magazine. He also says that Sport's success has meant there is less scepticism this time around.

But Tim Radcliffe, group head of press at rival Starcom, reports some standoffishness among clients, partly because the advertising rates are on the high side but also because advertisers have seen too many magazines slide downmarket after launch. As well as Nuts and Zoo, another recent example has been Grazia, which soon discovered a love of celebrity it initially shunned. "The first three to six months will be quite key," he concludes.

Naturally Soutar is more keen to focus on the milestone in free publishing that ShortList will represent.

"Without being too melodramatic about it, this is the dawning of a new era. We are not quite the first, and we certainly won't be the last," he says.

If he is right, it is unlikely to be long before there will be enough quality free titles in the UK to compile a top 10 of the best. List addicts the length of the country should take note.