When Casey Lewis was a teen-ager, in the early two-thousands, she would arrive home from school every day eager to find the latest issue of Seventeen or Teen Vogue or Elle Girl waiting on the kitchen counter. It was the era of low-rise jeans, ’NSync centerfolds, and unironic how-to columns dealing in the premise that there’s a correct way to be a teen-ager. If two issues arrived in one day, Lewis said, “It felt like winning the lottery.” She would take the magazines up to her room and read them like textbooks, poring over every story, every caption. She would attempt to memorize the styling tips and clothing credits, because the most sophisticated people her age understood not only which brands were trending but also what it would communicate about oneself to wear those brands. Throughout the month, Lewis would return to the magazines, using them to puzzle out period questions and divine whether her latest crush liked her back, because, in the pre-Google era, she trusted the editors of Seventeen more than she trusted Jeeves.
“I just loved teen magazines,” she said, when asked about her encyclopedic knowledge of the old issues, “I worshipped them.” They spoke to the type of person Lewis wanted to become. In the back of her mind, she imagined a version of herself following the glossies’ advice and living a perfect life. She was at an age when she still believed that adults were privy to the secrets of the universe, and she identified with the editor Atoosa Rubenstein, who founded CosmoGirl, in 1998, at the age of twenty-six, and later became the editor-in-chief of Seventeen. Rubenstein “put her awkward teen pictures in the editor’s letter,” Lewis remembered, “and it felt like such a revolutionary thing.” As a college student, Lewis interned at Teen Vogue and returned twice to the magazine before becoming a senior digital editor in 2015. The next year, she left to launch a teen newsletter called “Clover Letter,” which was later acquired by the Gen Z media company AwesomenessTV.
“What I really can’t explain is why the appeal of teen magazines hasn’t gone away for me,” Lewis said. (She now writes a youth-culture Substack called “After School.”) In 2018, she went home to Palmyra, Missouri, for the holidays. Rookie had just folded, and Seventeen and Teen Vogue had cut back their print issues. Feeling nostalgic for the golden age of teen media, Lewis started digging through hundreds of back issues that she’d saved in her childhood home and discovered within them a number of fascinating artifacts, including a photo of the Glossier founder Emily Weiss as an authority on thrifting and celebrity quotes such as “I love that I can use my cell phone to go on the ‘Net.’ ” She opened an Instagram account, named it @thankyouatoosa, and started posting the pages from her archives that had aged strangely, or seemed eerily prescient. Presenting the spreads at face value, the account is equal parts celebration and self-own.
Today, a youth publication would never publish a dieting tip or a headline like “He is sexy and makes a mean veggie burger, but is he worth hanging on to for the entire school year?” Many outlets—such as Elle Girl, CosmoGirl, Jump, YM, and Teen People—have ceased to exist completely. There are no longer any corporate teen magazines in print, aside from Seventeen special issues. Brands that once told teens what they should like now struggle to keep up with the teen-creator ecosystem, where young influencers exchange recommendations with their peers for free, and sponsored posts have effectively replaced advertising. Whereas teens previously trusted the wisdom of women who were four to twenty years older, they now turn to other teens on TikTok. Another shift seems to lie in what, exactly, teens consider to be aspirational. Most teen magazines of yore emphasized cookie-cutter perfection, but now everyone wants to be “authentic.”
But not all teen magazines were cookie-cutter. From 1988 to 1996, the twentysomething women behind Sassy helped teens become their most authentic selves—covering the riot-grrrl movement and quietly educating young women about feminism—amassing a cult following in the process. Issues of the magazine are routinely listed on eBay for nearly a hundred dollars each. In 2007, Faber & Faber published a love letter to the magazine, written by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer, called “How Sassy Changed My Life.” “We were there to catch the eye of the girl who was hanging out at the mall or going through the grocery store checkout line with her mom,” the magazine’s founding editor, Jane Pratt, said. “She would see coverlines that might have a superficial element to them, but then, when she picked it up and started looking at it, she would be subversively fed a message of self-acceptance and empowerment that was not what she went in expecting.”
In the twenty-tens, there was another teen magazine that spoke to the desire to live authentically, reached readers who were already frustrated with the mainstream, and might be used as a template for a teen magazine today. Rookie, founded by Tavi Gevinson, in 2011 (a year after Instagram launched), published teen and emerging artists whose work aimed to “make the best of the beautiful pain and cringeworthy awkwardness of being an adolescent girl,” per Gevinson’s inaugural editor’s letter. Like many teen-agers, Diya Chordia, a nineteen-year-old from Rajasthan, India, described Rookie as the first magazine where she saw her sensibility reflected back to her, since many of the contributors were teen-agers themselves who explored topics at the intersection of femininity and ambition. “It formed a community around itself, and right now I feel like it’s more fragmented,” Chordia said, of the current media landscape. Social media was not a major traffic driver to Rookie, Gevinson told me in an e-mail. The community was born out of a devoted readership, whose members visited the site an average of 7.7 times per month. “Our direct traffic was three times the amount of traffic via social media,” Gevinson said. “Our audience was really loyal and interested in curated, edited, often longform content that social media just isn’t really built for.”
Rookie was founded at a time when Instagram was nascent, YouTube was gaining serious momentum, and traditional teen magazines were struggling to stay relevant. Gevinson understood this. “When our publisher Lauren Redding and I were fundraising for Rookie, we were hoping to build it out into more of a creators’ network and community where not everything would have to go through our editors to be shared, and where people could pin each other’s work and ideas and build on them,” she wrote. “With TikTok and Instagram it seems a lot of former Rookie readers or would-be-Rookie-users have taken this kind of network into their own hands.” Though Rookie ultimately did not become a creators’ network, it was clear at the launch that the editors saw it as a place where young people could create content for one another. Rubenstein, the former Seventeen editor, described Rookie as “a great laboratory”—with the caveat that “a laboratory maybe can create Coca-Cola; a laboratory isn’t Coca-Cola.” In other words, though Rookie only reached six hundred thousand readers per month (per figures provided by Gevinson), its aesthetic and philosophical influence reverberated among young creatives online, who have gone on to reach audiences in the millions. Six hundred thousand readers is a significant readership for any magazine these days, but in 2011 Seventeen reportedly reached thirteen million per month.
Rookie also levelled the playing field when selecting talent and contributors. According to Gevinson, Rookie sourced contributors through a submissions in-box and scouted them on social media. “Sometimes readers also sent their work to our office or brought it to me at live events and became freelance contributors that way,” Gevinson wrote. “When our team was big enough, I was so glad our editors could take the time to work closely with new contributors to develop their work, since it was rare to find work that was ready to publish as it was, but common to be confronted with strong ideas that people just needed support in shaping. (Especially being teens or not having published before.)”
Though teen publications and social-media content both compete for eyeballs in the attention economy, a magazine will likely never reach the circulation of a single viral TikTok. “Teen Vogue is not really competition for TikTok,” Rubenstein, who now writes a first-person Substack called “Atoosa Unedited,” said. She sees youth-influencer content as a game of peer-to-peer telephone, and worries that “established thought leaders” (a.k.a. grownups) no longer exert enough influence over an impressionable demographic. “You turn to your friend, and your friend is telling you about sex or your body, and half the shit they say is wrong. We’re in that place again, but much more powerful,” she said, because, instead of hearing misinformation from a friend, teens are listening to strangers in California with millions of followers (and perceived credibility) on TikTok. At such a formative age, young people “need some really solid guidance, and the last place they want to get it is their parents,” she said. “Who are they turning to? For my child, it scares the shit out of me who she’s turning to.” During Rubenstein’s Seventeen years, she and the staff “wanted to make sure everything in the magazine was right, that it made sense,” she said. “It went through a really serious vetting process. That is gone. These children do not have access to any vetting, you know? No one’s vetting their TikTok videos.” (See: the nutmeg challenge.)
Phillip Picardi, a former chief content officer of Teen Vogue, believes young people no longer really have a need for what teen magazines once provided. “It’s hard to imagine a teen-ager spending a sustained amount of time reading articles when so much of [that same information] is being disseminated via creators on TikTok who are delivering it in short, snappy, concise, and extremely entertaining ways,” he said, noting that he’s not making a moral judgment on whether that’s good or bad. “Teen-agers today are coming of age and forming opinions and world views that are increasingly informed by algorithms and the bubbles that algorithms create,” he added.
Content is also easier to access via social media than via magazines, Elizabeth (Ro) Ajiduah, an eighteen-year-old writer from Sacramento, California, said. For young people who don’t control their own money, paywalls are a real issue. “That doesn’t mean young people aren’t interested in understanding what’s going on around them,” she said. “I know a lot of people who don’t know the different music critics at the New York Times, but if you ask them who Anthony Fantano is, or AjayII, they’ll know who they are, and they’ll be, like, ‘I heard their reaction to this album.’ ”
If Rookie had materialized as a creators’ network, as originally intended, Gevinson told me that it could have created “a place for like-minded young artists and writers” to experience “working with editors, without also having their behavioral patterns surveilled and sold as marketing data,” as they do on Instagram and TikTok. “It’s just a shame that Instagram and TikTok are so exploitative, starting with the business model alone. But I also subscribe to a few indie publications that I think do a wonderful job of cultivating a sense of community and curating really special work outside of the slog of social media, and that seem to have found ways to monetize these things.”
Both Pratt and Rubenstein believe there is room for a thoughtful, long-form product for young people. Rubenstein said it would need to be “juicy and interesting, but also substantive,” and Pratt said it would need to appeal to all genders and backgrounds, and, if it were in print—which she likened to vinyl records—it would need to appeal “to teen-agers who appreciate the retro element.” “The readers who are going to embrace it are the ones who are already out looking for it,” Pratt said, “not people who are stumbling upon it and discovering it and being converted into liking it.” And sadly, she believes, it’s probably the latter group that needs a teen magazine most.
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