The Waves: Where Have All the Teen Magazines Gone?

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🗓️ 16 September 2021

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

On this week’s episode of The Waves, Slate staff writers Rebecca Onion and Heather Schwedel dive into girls’ and women’s magazines. Many outlets like Sassy and CosmoGirl have been shuttered or moved to online-only editions. With the recent resurrection of teen magazine icon Atoosa Rubenstein in the media, Rebecca and Heather talk about what made these types of magazines pop and how problematic they were for their audience—especially the young girls. Then they dig into the lasting impact these relics have in the digital age. Recommendations: Rebecca: The 2016 PBS show Victoria and Nicola Griffith’s book Ammonite. Heather: Listening to music, especially if you usually listen to podcasts. Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Susan Matthews and June Thomas. Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves. Welcome to the waves.
0:14.2	Slates podcast about gender, feminism, and a brave new world where teenage girls read the same
0:20.0	things as everybody else. Every episode you've got a new pair of women to talk about the things we
0:25.5	can't get off our minds. Today, you've got me, Rebecca Onion, a staff writer for Slate.
0:30.2	And me, Heather Schwadal, a staff writer for Slate. What has happened to specialty teen and women's
0:36.7	publications and should we care? In the year 2000, when I graduated college, there were seven major
0:43.4	teen magazines in print. Now there are none, and the teen magazines that still exist are limping
0:48.8	along online. On the women's side, things aren't much better. Glamour stopped publishing the print
0:54.7	edition in 2019. Mary Claire's print issue, we found out a few days ago as we were preparing this
1:00.5	episode, is also being discontinued. What are the reading populations that once turned to these
1:07.2	publications, reading for fun, now, and where and contemporary media can we find their legacy?
1:15.3	Now, this is a topic very close to my heart because I started out in media at a teen magazine
1:20.4	called YM, and I wasn't completely happy there, but it was also a teen magazine, Sassy,
1:28.3	the great, dear beloved Sassy, which everyone in Generation X remembers that made me feel like I
1:34.7	even wanted to be a magazine writer. And right now, today, I doubly want to talk about this pressing
1:42.0	issue because Heather has just published an excellent piece on the one-time editor of Cosmo Girl
1:48.0	in 17, who now has a sub-stack and is becoming an Instagram personality, a Tusa Rubenstein.
1:55.0	Heather, why is this topic close to your heart? I was also an avid reader of teen magazines,
2:01.6	and the time that you're talking about when you graduated college, that was when I was a
2:07.3	preteen and early teen. But there was a particular mini-boom of them. That's when Cosmo Girl started,
2:15.2	which is the magazine that a Tusa Rubenstein founded. That's when teen people started,
2:20.8	Elle Girl, Teen Vogue. And I also used to love reading the print versions of women's magazines.
	...

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