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It would seem a strange time to go all in on a print magazine, let alone one geared at digital-native Gen Z readers. Last April, Roger Lynch, the CEO of Condé Nast, announced the end of several publications, including Self, the health and wellness magazine, along with Glamour’s German, Spanish, and Mexican editions. Months earlier, Condé laid off 70 percent of the staff of Teen Vogue and folded it under the Vogue umbrella as part of a shift away from coverage of politics and activism and toward career development and cultural leadership. The moves at Condé came a year after the mass layoffs at Hearst Magazines, when close to two hundred people lost their jobs. And yet in the coming months, a spate of new magazines will emerge, targeting an unexpected audience: teenagers.
This summer will see the debut of Cuqui (pronounced “cookie”), a teen publication founded by Paula James-Martinez, the former fashion director of Refinery29. The magazine—set to debut as a thirty-five-dollar print “collectible” that will then go monthly starting in January of 2027—will cover pop culture, style, and sexual health and publish essays by teenagers. The idea came to James-Martinez when she realized she didn’t want her nine-year-old daughter on social media. “There’s a huge cultural void,” she told me. “There is absolutely nothing else for them apart from the internet at this point.” A one-year subscription will cost a hundred bucks. “It should come in around eight dollars an issue,” James-Martinez said, “which is expensive, but it’s also the same price as a cup of coffee in America today.”
Cuqui won’t be attending the print party alone. WYouth (pronounced “double youth”), a Gen Z–focused sister publication of W, the fashion magazine, will debut in September. It’s the creation of Sara Moonves, the editor in chief of W; Sofia Coppola, the Oscar-winning filmmaker; and Ava Nirui, the former creative director of Heaven, Marc Jacobs’s youth-focused line. WYouth aims to publish a semiannual print edition and has recruited Coppola and Cosima Croquet, her fifteen-year-old daughter, as contributing editors. Print magazines “were so influential and shaped all of the things we were obsessed with,” Nirui said in April. “We want to bring back that spirit, but for today—through pop culture experimentation and physical media.” (Representatives for W did not respond to a request for comment.)
I was once part of the target demographic for teen magazines. Born a week shy of millennialhood, I am something of an elder Zoomer. Instagram debuted when I was thirteen, by which point I was already on Facebook. Snapchat would soon invade my high school. And yet, when I think back on that time, what comes to mind are the pink glossies I’d read at sleepovers: covers featuring Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez, pieces dissecting first kisses, spreads on perfectly tacky eyeshadow. I recall a guide on how to get a bikini-ready body in six weeks that recommended cutting all forms of sugar and sweets starting five weeks before summer. I took the advice way more seriously than anyone ever should.
By then, teen magazines were already in decline. Teen Vogue lost a third of its subscribers between 2005 and 2015. Teen magazine’s circulation, more than a million in 1995, had plummeted to roughly 230,000 a decade later. About a quarter of Seventeen’s overall circulation came via newsstand sales in 1995; by 2015, it had dropped to only 4 percent. CosmoGirl published its last American issue in 2008. Teen quickly followed suit. Teen Vogue ceased print in 2017. Seventeen abandoned print in 2018 and moved to a digital-first strategy.
“I feel like everything has changed so much,” Kaiya, a fifteen-year-old former reader of Girls’ World, told me. “When people go to look for things that influence them—fashion and beauty and all that stuff—a lot of people just go online, right?” Vasilisa, a sixteen-year-old who helps run her high school newspaper, doubted the new magazines would reach her. “I’ve only seen magazines in airport stores, or, like, sometimes I go to Barnes & Noble.”
Of course, the collapse of print magazines coincides with the all-consuming rise of digital life. The amount of time teens spend with print media has declined significantly since the mid-2000s, just as smartphones took over. Today, teens spend nearly five hours a day on social media, with one in five saying they are on TikTok and YouTube “almost constantly.” The search algorithms that guide these platforms are customized, serving an avalanche of content catering to no one but the user and their swiping thumb. Teen magazines, by contrast, were carefully curated catalogues, tailored to appeal to an entire generation.
This is exactly what Cuqui is trying to bring back. “It’s designed to get young people back into a curated editorial space, away from the algorithm,” Brittney McNamara, the magazine’s features editor, told me, “and back into something that reflects their culture and their universe.” Momentum could be shifting in her favor. A recent poll from Harris shows that 81 percent of Gen Zers wish they could unplug from their devices more easily. At least when it comes to marketing campaigns, more than 70 percent of them think print, compared with digital, feels more authentic. In February, after employing an online-only model for a couple of years, the newspaper Vasilisa helps run revived its print edition. When she and her team hand out fresh editions, they have observed real enthusiasm among their peers. “If someone presented me with a magazine, I would be way more excited,” Vasilisa told me.
Right now, print has become “a novelty. It’s something different. It’s something interesting,” McNamara said. “So it’s about adapting to your audience.”
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