Publications for the Young and the Restless

For some teen-agers mainstream magazines have not gone far enough fast enough, leaving an opportunity for new kinds of publications to elbow their way onto the newsstands.

YSB (Young Sisters & Brothers) focuses on African-American teen-agers and addresses both boys and girls. Although small, with a circulation of about 150,000, the Washington D.C.-based publication, owned by Black Entertainment Television, represents a growing segment of publications that target a specific group.

“It is a way of seeing positive role models,” says Frank Dexter Brown, editor of YSB and a Los Angeles native. “When you look through every page of the book you see yourself, you see African-Americans of many different hues, you will see many different hair styles, youth of many different sizes, which reflect the variety and the diversity of our community.”

Around the country, teen-agers have also become publishers themselves.

A newspaper produced in 1977 in Chicago, now called New Expression, was the first written by and for teen-agers. Working under an umbrella group, Youth Communication, teen-agers like those who work on L.A. Youth here produce their own papers in Dallas, Atlanta, Hartford, Portland, New York, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and other cities.

Each paper serves as a bureau for Youth News Service, a national, nonprofit wire service under the auspices of Youth Communication.

Their topics are bold. Youth Outlook in San Francisco has run stories about teens killing teens and street teen-agers creating squatter homes. United Youth of Boston looked at police abuse through the eyes of youth and girlfriend battering among teens. L.A. Youth ran an issue of essays, poetry and photographs dealing with the effects of the 1992 riots on the city’s teen-agers.

As much as they have changed in the past decade, says Craig Trygstad, executive director of Youth Communication, the mainstream teen magazines are still not relevant or accessible to many of the teens who work on these papers.

“They tend to focus on ideal teens, ideal situations,” Trygstad says. “Even when they go after tough subjects, they don’t always get to the young people who are most in need of the information.”

Seventeen reinforces “cultural expectations that an adolescent woman should be more concerned with her appearance, her relations with other people and her ability to win approval from men than with her own ideas or her expectations for herself,” Kimberly Phillips, 17, writes in Extra!, the journal published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

Phillips began producing a political newspaper in New York after the Gulf War. Teen-agers have good reasons to demand more from their publications, she says. “There’s kind of a vague fear and unhappiness among teen-agers about the world that they’re facing--about the country, about the economy, about race problems.”