Mackenzie Morrison reads Teen Vogue, one of only a handful of magazines left on newsstands that caters to younger girls. (Justin Franz/MJR)

Teen mags give way to websites

by Erin Cole

When a 2006 national study declared that “the Internet has become THE youth medium of choice,” publishers of teen magazines already knew they were in trouble. In accordance with this trend, teens began to eschew monthly print runs for the siren call of 24/7 online media. Waiting at the mailbox for a monthly fashion fix became an increasingly antiquated pastime.

The reign of American teen magazines began in 1944 with the arrival of Seventeen on newsstands. In the post-war economic boom, titles flourished once publishers realized the magazines’ cash cow potential. At the turn of the 21st century, traditional women’s titles spun out “sister” versions to attract younger readers into their orbit. For a time, the future appeared rosy. But as the result of advances in technology, the golden age of teen magazines would be short-lived.

Between 2001 and 2008, more than half a dozen teen titles bit the dust. Content was either moved online or the brand disappeared entirely. The surviving publications closed in and purchased their databases and domains. This mass migration to the online realm signaled the start of a brave new world.

Marketing ploys

Faced with becoming additional victims of the digital schism, teen magazine publishers were forced to redraw their battle plans. The youth market, with an estimated $150 billion of annual buying power, was too valuable a demographic to lose.

This was an age group that had flummoxed marketers for years. If a media company was successful in attracting teens to their publication, their victory was short-lived. The paradox was that it was only a matter of years before the targeted audience would age out and leave the subscription base. Adding to the uncertainty was the all-too-common response of teens behaving in typical fashion and rejecting the proffered offerings.

Condé Nast, arbiter of taste, experienced this firsthand in 2007 when teens failed to latch onto its youth multimedia venture. Flip.com was billed as a chic social network where teens could bundle together and share their favorite multimedia in virtual “flip” books. After failing to make even a small dent in the successes of Facebook and MySpace, the project was dropped. As for its teen print magazine, Teen Vogue, which began publication in 2003, Condé Nast trimmed the magazine to digest-size, hoping to make it appeal to a mobile audience.

Two years earlier saw the launch of Hachette’s ELLEgirl, also digest-size. Ad revenue was initially strong for the magazine, but top brass hoped for stronger returns. Hachette tried bumping up the number of annual publications and slashed the cover price to $1.99. Despite these attempts, ELLEgirl closed in 2006.

“It is always unfortunate to have to close a magazine, but today the teen market is increasingly fragmented,” Hachette CEO Jack Kliger said at the time. “To effectively reach these girls, we must invest in the media where they spend most of their time and where we see our greatest growth potential.”

The media Kliger was referring to was the Internet. Today, ELLEgirl lives online, where it was relaunched in 2008. Content is purportedly pumped in by an editorial team that works closely with the staff of ELLE.com.

Birth of the Alpha Kitties

Hearst Corporation’s CosmoGirl, another leading teen magazine, shuttered in 2008, but not before producing a media star. Atoosa Rubenstein stirred waters in 1999 when she became Hearst’s youngest editor in chief at age 26 at CosmoGirl.

Many hopes were pinned on the Iranian-born Rubenstein. She managed to cultivate a rare connection with her readers, whom she dubbed “Alpha Kitties.” CosmoGirl was an overnight success, in part because its readers could associate a face and a personality with the masthead.

“If a diary could talk back with advice and solace, it might sound like Ms. Rubenstein,” wrote The New York Times.

Rubenstein’s efforts extended far beyond the traditional Letter From the Editor. She was the first teen magazine editor to actively seek out e-mail communication with readers. Rubenstein understood the technology trends and encouraged communication with readers across several different platforms, including MySpace and YouTube.

2005 saw Rubenstein score a big coup, when as the editor in chief of Hearst-owned Seventeen, she partnered with MTV to produce a reality show called “Miss Seventeen.” The show, which she hosted, followed a group of college girls competing for a chance at an internship at the magazine.

‘’The modern editor in chief has to see themselves as the editor in chief of a brand, with the publication one part of that brand,” Rubenstein said in a 2005 interview with The New York Times.

When it became obvious that teens were tuning in for Atoosa the brand, rather than for the Seventeen brand, Rubenstein jumped off the glossy bandwagon. In 2006, she started her own media company, Big Momma Productions, intending to develop online multimedia content and provide consulting in teen media. Yet something happened that affected Rubenstein’s ability to strike while the iron was hot.

Today, two years after the birth of her first child, Rubenstein has all but vanished from both the print and online worlds.

“I’m pretty much the editor in chief of my family at this point,” she said in a 2009 interview.

Her MySpace page hasn’t witnessed an update since 2008. Her YouTube account is in similar straits. Meanwhile, her Big Momma Productions website, where she was purportedly “building a new home for our tribe,” has yet to produce content. The Alpha Kitty empire, which so many looked forward to as the next wave in teen media, appears dead.

Perhaps one woman could only carry the torch so far. At the very least, Rubenstein blazed a trail for a future mogul to follow.

As seen on ‘The Hills’

Impressed with rival Hearst’s success with MTV, Condé Nast decided to partner its Teen Vogue with the television network. In 2006, one of the stars of the MTV show “The Hills” landed an internship at Teen Vogue’s Los Angeles bureau. The result was branding genius. “The Hills” quickly became MTV’s highest-rated television show. Each episode, featuring a behind-the-scenes look at the magazine, piped into millions of homes and thoroughly infiltrated youth pop culture.

“It’s almost becoming like a novel at this point, like this generation’s ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ or ‘Oliver Twist,’’’ Tony DiSanto, MTV’s executive vice president of series programming and development, said in 2008.

The Teen Vogue venture lasted two seasons on “The Hills” before the cast headed for other pastures. Despite the parting of ways, the show lent the magazine a public face that extended well beyond their print product.

The blogosphere

Rather than feeling threatened, media conglomerates once looked upon fashion blogs as cute side notes produced by fashion-obsessed fans. This viewpoint evaporated when these sites’ bloggers gained sizeable audiences and a style authority that rivaled that of fashion magazines.

Partly to blame for this switch in allegiance was the fashion cycle. For decades, magazines revolved around biannual designer collections, one in the spring and one in the fall. At the turn of the 21st century, popular stores such as H&M and Zara, with their racks full of disposable fashion, proliferated. Instead of monthly updates in stock, stores began unpacking fresh merchandise weekly to keep up with the competition. This forced relevant fashion commentary and criticism to become faster and more frequent.

Not only did teen magazines’ monthly publishing schedule work against them, but they were unable to offer the untold realms of multimedia that blogs could. Runway videos, designer interviews and models’ video diaries from Fashion Week couldn’t translate into print.

Blogs could also offer teens a gamut of information and perspectives from their peers. Petra Benton, a 20-year-old New Zealander who runs the blog City of Petra, is an example of this growing trend.

“We don’t have trust funds or stylists who dress us,” Benson said in an interview with the New Zealand press. “We are for the most part pretty everyday people.

“Readers identify with this. Seeing others wear something you wouldn’t dare to is quite eye-opening, and it makes you ask yourself, ‘Why not?”’

Blogs also allowed for new fashion journalists to be discovered. Teens and adults alike follow Tavi Gevinson’s blog Style Rookie with slavish devotion. Started in 2008 when she was just 11, the blog now receives around 30,000 hits a day. Gevinson devours and dissects fashion magazines, though it is important to note that these are adult fashion magazines. Her tastes lend empirical evidence to the growing sophistication of teen readers, many of whom prefer older titles than the ones marketed to them. Gevinson also embeds videos of runway shows and interviews with designers and other fashion personalities in her blog.

Cell phones and iPhones and iPods, oh my

Where a teenage girl in the 1980s was confined to making calls in her bedroom on a Princess rotary phone, today’s teens experience mobile technology.

Seventeen takes the lead in producing applications for these beloved gadgets. It created an iPhone app that serves as a stylist and allows a teen to track down clothes in her city. Seventeen also produces a podcast that follows one of its beauty editors backstage at New York Fashion Week.

Compared to Seventeen’s forays, The ELLEgirl BlackBerry app is in its infancy. It merely links to the ELLEgirl website and doesn’t offer any additional content. Teen Vogue, meanwhile, has an iPhone app that serves as a virtual fashion closet.

It is too soon to make a definite prediction about the effect the iPad will have on teen magazines. Condé Nast, for example, formatted only five of its titles for the device, all of them geared to the adult reader. It is likely that once the advertising and circulation revenues have been gauged, Condé Nast and other media companies will offer more titles, including teen magazines, or discontinue the venture.

And then there were two

On today’s newsstands, only two of the traditional teen magazines remain in print: Seventeen and Teen Vogue. While the content has not drastically altered in recent years, mentions of the online versions abound between the covers. Readers are directed to explore real-time polls, backstage looks at cover shoots, up-to-the-moment celebrity gossip and, of course, shopping links at the magazines’ respective websites.

All this linkage and cross-promotion leaves a question begging to be asked: If teen magazines really are the “training wheels of the glossies,” as writer Anna Quart calls them, will graduated teen readers easily fall into the fold of adult women’s titles, or will there be a technology disconnect?

In order to avoid the latter, women’s titles need to meet the online challenge head-on. Vogue Italia and Marie Claire are two magazines that have succeeded. Both titles have developed websites that feature a gamut of multimedia packaged in an attractive design. Marie Claire has tie-ins to the über popular reality show Project Runway, and both mediums cross-promote the other. Meanwhile, those in the know skip the stodgy American Vogue website for Vogue Italia’s bilingual masterpiece, which has received accolades for its design and content.

It is safe to say the future of traditional teen magazines is unknown. While print magazines may be on the wane, it is an infallible certainty that teen girls will always desire advice from authorities other than their parents. Just as surely as necessity is the mother of invention, each coming century will boast some sort of medium that will cater to teens’ tastes.