September 28th, 2004

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For Girls Who Get It

I learned about Shameless Magazine from this photo of their bookish editorial staff on photojunkie.ca (don’t miss his fetching shots of Lisa Loeb):

Shameless is a progressive magazine for teenage girls who are underrepresented in the mainstream media: freethinkers, queer youth, young women of colour, punk rockers, feminists, intellectuals, artists and activists. It’s for girls who want more than the hair and makeup tips shovelled out by typical teen mags. Sometimes serious, sometimes saucy, but always straight up, Shameless tackles teen life with wit and wisdom.

I’ve never actually seen the print edition, but it sounds like a great idea if they can pull it off. I’m vaguely familiar with the economics of magazine publishing, and they’re not pretty. They don’t have much content magazine online, but here’s one story.

Once they’ve published an issue, they really should put all of that issue’s content online (they can wait a few weeks if they like). It will definitely help with their longterm readership. They are doing a number of things right, however. The editors have a weblog (no RSS feed, so that girl doesn’t totally get it), and there’s a discussion forum and some informal photo albums.

Comments: 2 Responses so far

Sue
September 28th, 2004
1:16 pm

JANE magazine was trying to do exactly this when they started up in the mid-90s. Unfortunately they got trapped in the heroin-chic “too cool to be popular” vibe and a lot of sincerely interested readers (e.g. me) got completely turned off. I’ll be interested in whether Shameless can pull it off.

Bottom line is that advertisers want to spend their dollars on the “market influencers” who are at the leading edge of lots and lots of teenagers with allowances burning holes in their pockets. Shameless isn’t targeting those people, so they’re going to have a major struggle for positive cash flow.

Is Ms. magazine still around? Shameless sounds like it’s trying to be a junior version of Ms.

[Reply]

alexis
September 29th, 2004
6:51 am

I had a copy and I liked it. It’s more like Sassy than anything else. The articles are smart and straight up and it’s fun.

It’s a bit Toronto centric, which is my only problem with it. I wish them well.

[Reply]

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