Looking Younger and Bolder Every Day : Media: Might. Bikini. Swing. bOING bOING. They’re part of a new wave of magazines with that twentysomething appeal.
The denizens of the generation formerly known as X are not satisfied with Whitetail Slug Hunter, Favorite Cakes or even U.S. Immigrant.
Fighting for space on the newsstands with these special-interest manuals is a new and growing batch of scatter-themed magazines meant for the media-hungry 18- to 34-year-old attention span. “This age bracket has felt left out by mainstream publications,” says Steve Cohn, editor of Media Industry Newsletter, explaining the recent push to create the ‘90s version of the ‘60s Rolling Stone.
Indeed, Samir Husni, a University of Mississippi journalism professor and the author of the annual “Guide to New Consumer Magazines,” reports a boom over the last three years in titles aimed at this market, with 12 appearing in 1994 alone. “Everybody wants to reach this generation,” he says.
Although generally loath to mention their target audience by its nearly defunct buzz-letter, the creators of such titles as Axcess, bOING bOING, KGB, INsider, Might, Project X, Spec, U.H.F. and XSeSS Living have their diverse interests in mind.
Unlike the popular music mag Spin and countless underground ‘zines, the new entries rely on the general rubrics of culture and lifestyle and all that they entail: movies, hip celebrities, sports, politics, money, music, sex, fashion, books, technology, travel and health. Some choose one theme (fashion, technology) as a lens to examine the others.
And in another possible hedge against a 50% failure rate within the first year, these mags try to speak to both genders. New York-based Swing, for example, hoped to attract men and women with its June cover story on LUGs, or Lesbians Until Graduation.
Swing Editor David Lauren, 23-year-old son of fashion designer Ralph, takes a traditional approach in format and content, like a “young Time or Vanity Fair.”
“We take issues and make them accessible to our audience,” Lauren says. “For instance, you can read about health care anywhere, but we tailor it to people in their 20s--how it relates to getting your first job, getting married, buying a mortgage for your first home.”
Twentysomething zeal so pervades the 7-month-old monthly that nearly all of its contributors--and the people they write about and photograph for the pages between the Ralph Lauren ads--are under 30. Taken to the extreme, this strategy results in such articles as “FBI’s Most Wanted Under 30.” (Look, we Gen Xers can be criminals, too!)
Other upstarts convey the same Zeitgeist, but with a tone of irreverence. “Magazines are stupid and celebrity-hounding, so if you don’t make fun of that, you’re advocating mindlessness,” says David Turin, the 29-year-old executive editor of Santa Monica-based Bikini.
The most polished example of this attitude arguably belongs to Might, which makes fun of pretty much everything. The San Francisco-based bimonthly is close in spirit to Spy magazine in its heyday, with a disdain for inflated egos, a fascination with pop culture debris and a belief that absolutely nothing, including itself, is sacred.
Other magazines are Frequent targets , including Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone (“How would I ever have heard about hot new bands like Green Day or the Counting Crows or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers without it?”) and Swing, which Might lambasted with a “Twenty in their 20s” spread.
“If we were going to do a joke about ‘Generation X’ magazines, we couldn’t do it better than Swing,” says David Moodie, Might’s 24-year-old editor.
Might also lambastes itself, beginning with the Table of Contents: “Page 63--Music section, the format of which is getting hopelessly tired. Of course, without it, we wouldn’t have a lot of this music company advertising, and all those free tapes and CDs that serve as payment to contributors. . . .”
And its latest cover story is a collection of more than 300 things that are “cheesy,” such as pronouncing croissant “the French way,” and, of course, “lists like this.”
“We describe it as a ‘brain picnic’ for the young and the restless,” Moodie says. “We’re not aiming at a Douglas Coupland-created, McDonald’s and MTV-fed audience, which is ridiculous.”
Might’s circulation has tripled to 30,000 since its start-up in February, 1994, but it is still losing money. Swing’s print run, on the other hand, is a robust 220,000.
The precedents for Might and its ilk are ‘zines, the underground, no-holds-barred magazines circulated via the Xerox and fax machine. (The editors of Might also publish Madame C, a ‘zine concerning “everyone’s favorite dead radiation scientist.”)
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Often created and produced by one person, ‘zines are intensely personal, and many new mags incorporate their first-person, upfront and expletive-filled style.
In many cases, the author’s presence becomes as important as, or even more important than, the subject matter; a review of a film, for instance, may digress into a description of the meal the reviewer ate afterward.
“We like to have people tell it as it is,” explains Turin of the bimonthly Bikini. “We’re geared toward being on the side of the reader, not the celebrity.”
Essentially, these mags are ‘zines wrapped up in glossy packages made accessible by desktop publishing software and inexpensive printing technology, magazine-watcher Husni says. Given those tools, beginners can incorporate the challenging layouts and fresh typefaces of such ground breakers as the techno bible Wired and the cutting-edge music mag Raygun.
But some new mags have abandoned the print medium altogether. So-called digizines, such as Blender, Chaos Control, Just Think, Launch, Substance, and Trouble and Attitude, offer magazine content via computer. Mailed to subscribers on CD-ROMs or accessed directly through the Internet, digizines take advantage of technology to incorporate video and audio samples.
Raygun Publishing, which owns both Raygun and Bikini, plans to launch a CD-ROM magazine early next year in conjunction with musician Dave Stewart, formerly of the Eurythmics. The publication, entitled MAFIA (Music Art Fashion Interactive Alliance), will contain both a CD-ROM and a separate printed offering.
Similarly, XSeSS Living CDZeene offers printed content, but contains in every issue a CD with a sampling of new music. It is the size of a CD case, costs $8.95 and is more likely to be found in a bookstore or music store than at the local newsstand.
“It’s portable, durable and easy to read,” says Sean Perkin, the 25-year-old editor and publisher of the Beverly Hills-based CDZeene. “It has a booklike quality. It has inherent value, so people don’t throw it away.”
