Bridget Orr writes:
Magazines have shaped my long-burning ambition to write for a living. If it wasn't for writing what would be in the speech bubbles for a story about an orphaned young horse-rider on Bunty, it would have been as an irreverent agony aunt carrying on the tradition of Cathy and Claire, a reviewer for the NME or if I was lucky, editing my own teenage magazine that would end up getting named after me. So it saddened me that the teenage girls of today are being uninspired by traditional and new media publishing in their lives...
Both the Guardian and the Telegraph report on how the websites related to both Mizz and Bliss magazines have 'hot or not' features concerning celebrities, lush lads and the readership themselves and the chance to purchase airbrushing software on the site, presumably for default pictures on social networking sites. The findings, that were taken from Women in Journalism's 'Am I Bovvered?: What are Teenage Girls Really Thinking?' conference arrive at a time where issues of moral responsibility in response to recent scandals involving FHM are still relevant.
At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old woman at the tender age of 21 and a half, I have come to notice that teenage magazines seem to be growing closer to their older sisters in the 'Women's Lifestyle' section whilst suggesting that their readers have a reading level equivalent to someone in Primary 4. As much as the 'grown-up' posturing in teenage mags about fashion, boys and real life might make Concerned Mothers of Tunbridge Wells tut in the letters pages, the emphasis on the visual instead of the verbal communication in magazines betrays this supposed sophistication. Using the same old celebrity gossip, tragic life stories and body flaw features as Closer and Heat but in more 'teenage' language emphasises a laziness in the part of the writers suggesting that their readers are too stupid not to have read these features before much earlier on blogs or in more adult magazines.
With print magazines seemingly on the way out, the main reason is usually due to the advent of Web 2.0 being more attractive to the 'typical' teen with the attention span of a goldfish on sherbet. I would like to think however, that this decline is due to the lack of sufficient reading material in the magazines themselves that is not used to advertise or persuade girls to buy a certain product. Instead of perpetuating the rabid consumer with bitchiness and low-self esteem issues, why did the teenage magazines ignore real teenagers with ambitions, creativity and real feelings and opinions about the world and who could one day edit them*? No, scratch that, when did the teenage magazines (and the lad mags too!) start thinking that teenagers were functionally illiterate?
Do you happen to know any teenagers with any of these ambitions? If so, they will love Dollymix.
[Image via Ann Douglas on Flickr]
