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get taken seriously
Ad boom and a top edit award for Teen People
By Jennifer Cox
When Teen People was named the winner of the General Excellence Award for magazines with a circulation of 1 million-plus at last week’s National Magazine Awards, the announcement undoubtedly served as the afternoon’s climax.
The chorus of screams that followed had less to do with Teen People’s newcomer status or its youthful staff than with a long history and longer odds: In 36 years, no teen magazine has ever won the American Society of Magazine Editors’ top honor.
Barbara O’Dair, managing editor of Teen People, blames the "frivolity associated with the teen market" for the category’s failure ever to garner so much as a nod from the ASME judges since Jane Pratt's now-defunct Sassy scored a General Excellence nomination in 1991.
"Teens are people too," says O’Dair. "And adults often want to overlook that because of the romantic fantasy they have that childhood is wonderful and carefree," she says.
O’Dair’s mission at the magazine is anything but carefree these days. An immediate hit for Time Inc. when it launched three years ago, Teen People is a magazine in transition within a category in flux.
It was only three months ago that O’Dair was named Teen People’s second managing editor, succeeding Christina Ferrari, who resigned earlier this year to join Henry Muller in Europe.
Her tenure begins just as teen publications, one of the hottest market segments in recent years, seem to be cooling off.
In the second half of last year, all of the four biggest teen titles suffered single-digit decreases in total paid circulation, and three of the four titles—Teen People, YM and Teen—saw their newsstand sales slip by more than 10 percent, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
For Teen People, which slid 3.2 percent in total circulation and 22.3 percent in newsstand sales, the decreases represented its first circulation setbacks.
But O’Dair, who came to Time Inc. after holding senior editorial positions at Harper’s Bazaar and Details, predicts the losses will prove a temporary blip rather than a lasting trend, at least for Teen People.
"I think we’re going to keep growing," she says. "If anyone’s going to be left standing it’s going to be us."
O’Dair is currently at work outlining the next stage of evolution for Teen People.
Beginning with the August issue, the magazine will sport a somewhat different look, with several new sections, including a teen news and lifestyle component, and increased beauty and fashion service in the style pages.
"I admired the work my predecessor had done and saw I could take it further," says O’Dair of her initial assessment of the magazine. "No matter how good something is, it could always be better."
Though she’s careful not to criticize Ferrari’s work on Teen People, O’Dair says one of her concerns upon taking over was seeing to it that Teen People never talk down to its readers.
"I wanted to make sure we would never dip to pure earnestness."
Besides the difficulty of sustaining Teen People’s early momentum in a publishing climate that has grown noticeably chillier, O’Dair may soon face another challenge in the form of fresh competition from Condé Nast and Hachette Filipacchi.
Condé Nast has already published two test issues of Teen Vogue and is pondering putting the title into regular publication, while Hachette has announced plans to debut an Elle spinoff, Elle Girl, beginning this fall.
Both launches will face the same problems existing teen titles already grapple with, which include overcrowding in the category and a deteriorating newsstand distribution system.
But one thing that may encourage both Condé Nast and Hachette is the advertising picture. Though the magazine industry at large is threatening to fall into an ad recession, teen titles have continued to perform strongly in the first quarter of the year.
Teen People’s ad pages were up 10.1 percent through the first quarter of the year, and ad revenue jumped 25.6 percent to $13.1 million, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.
YM and CosmoGirl have both reported substantial page increases this year, while category leader Seventeen was up 1.8 percent in pages and 11.1 percent in revenue. Only Emap USA’s Teen magazine was off through March: down 15.1 percent in pages and 5.9 percent in ad dollars versus first quarter 2000.
May 8, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Jennifer Cox is a staff writer for Media Life.
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