How the Cult of Adolescent Celebrity Ate the Magazine Biz

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 1, 2004 by Simon Dumenco

Byline: Simon Dumenco

I was talking to a friend in the magazine world recently - a veteran of A-list glossies, who spent decades editing serious journalism by serious A-list writers. He described his feelings of displacement (he bailed out of his last job when a new, young editor-in-chief arrived to "liven" things up) and his absolute sense of estrangement as an old-school journalist in a radically transformed industry. As he spoke, the lyrics of the Talking Heads song "Once in a Lifetime" came to mind:

You may find yourself in another part of the world You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile... You may ask yourself Well, how did I get here?

These days more and more editors find themselves behind the wheels of certain types of, um, large automobiles - celebrity-obsessed glossies - that have taken over the print-media highway with all the subtlety of a fleet of Hummers. (I'll spare you the journalism-as-roadkill visual intrinsic to this metaphor.) Countless writers, designers and photo directors are along for the ride, all devoting vast chunks of their creative and intellectual powers to deconstructing, say, Britney Spears's relationship with her Justin Timberlake look-alike fiance, or parsing the exact nature of Mary-Kate Olsen's stint in rehab.

So how did we get here? There is one popular theory - of Us Weekly creationism, which holds that Bonnie Fuller basically invented a whole new magazine creature in her basement laboratory, an unstoppable mutant species that was emulated by In Touch Weekly and then by Bonnie herself when she moved to Star.

But the larger truth, I think, is simultaneously more subtle and more epochal: We've all - all of us in the magazine industry - become teenagers. Or at least we're being asked to become teenagers, thanks to forces beyond our control.

I've been mulling the magazine world's psychographic shift lately because of the recent relaunch of a publication called Popstar! (Just like Folio:, its name formally includes an annoying bit of punctuation, but for the remainder of this column I'm going to leave off the exclam. Forgive me!)

Unless you're a media critic or a 15-year-old girl (or, like me, both), you've probably never heard of it. But in a way, Popstar quietly changed everything. When it first launched in 1998, it was one of a kind. Published then by Biograph Communications, an obscure little company that had issued a series of glossy, one-off newsstand specials on the likes of Princess Diana, Leonardo DiCaprio and The Beatles, Popstar's founding editor-in-chief was a pop-culturally-literate sometime novelist (Blind Items) named Matthew Rettenmund. Inspired by the success of Biograph's Hollywood's Hottest Hunks special, Rettenmund's bright idea was to launch the company's first regularly published title - in the process creating the first teen celebrity magazine to be 100 percent full-color glossy.

This was no small revolution. As hard as it is to believe, as late as the late 1990s the traditional teen celebrity magazines like Tiger Beat and 16 - the decades-old mainstays that once obsessed about David Cassidy and The Monkees - were still dominated by two-color signatures printed on newsprint-ish stock. Their full-color forms were meant only for the covers and the pinups. They were dowdy and truly cheesy. Somehow, the teen celebrity magazine market languished in the 1990s, even as the teen market itself (and general-interest teen titles like Seventeen and YM) exploded.

Popstar showed up and took its objectness - including its design - seriously, while Tiger Beat and its ilk looked like they were still assembled on paste-up boards with X-Acto knives. Popstar was multiethnic, too, mixing in pinups of The Artist Then Known as Puff Daddy with 'N Sync in its very first issue. It was Internet-savvy - Web addresses for fan sites were liberally sprinkled throughout its pages - and it had a hyperactive, fluorescent-hued, Pop-Up Video-style visual architecture. In short, it single-handedly modernized and legitimized its niche.

In fact, little indie Popstar - the first proof-of-concept of a modern teen-celebrity magazine - stirred the loins of a couple of big consumer magazine companies. Primedia (publisher pro tem of Folio:) bought Tiger Beat and several of its siblings from dusty old Sterling-McFadden, converted them to 100 percent full-color, then suddenly changed course. (With the ad recession deepening, it shut some titles down and sold off the survivors, abandoning a vaunted teen marketing strategy that included the in-school TV network Channel One.) Future In Touch publisher Bauer joined the game too, starting 100 percent full-color teen celeb glossies called J-14 and M (in 1999 and 2000, respectively).

Popstar, in short, created a new blueprint for the teen celebrity magazine market. But strangely enough, it also ended up serving as a blueprint of sorts for the whole current crop of adult celebrity magazines.

Take a look at the kind of stars the adult celebrity weeklies now obsess about - Britney, Justin, Orlando Bloom, the Olsen twins - and there's about a 70 percent overlap with the crowd of smooth-skinned hotties that Popstar obsesses about. That wasn't the case even a few years ago, when the average American would have been hard-pressed to ID the youthful celebrities on Popstar's cover.