Magazine gives teens with views
a place to express them
By Ann Treiger Kurland
Boston Globe - October 11, 2004
You won’t find the latest teen idol on the cover of this teen magazine.
There’s no article inside doling out advice on how to find a homeroom
heartthrob or, tips on looking cool for school. Instead, the magazine
deals with such serious issues as peer pressure, body image,
self-esteem, and racial discrimination.
Sound too weighty for
teenagers? Think again. The magazine is written entirely by teens
themselves - and perhaps because of that, it claims a readership in the
millions.
Teen Ink is the creation of John and Stephanie Meyer
of Newton. Founded 15 years ago in their basement, the magazine has no
staff writers. Instead, it relies on submissions from teenagers. They
haven’t been hard to come by. Last year, the magazine, received 54,000
pieces of work, a quarter of which arrived through its website,
Teenink.com.
Printed on newsprint, the magazine is a far cry
from the slick teen magazines on newsstands. Articles cover subjects
ranging from sports to community service to the environment. Other types
of work are also welcome. The magazine publishes poetry, personal
essays, drawings, photos, and reviews of music, books, and
colleges.
The Meyers say they created Teen Ink because they
believed teenagers had important things to say but few places to express
their views on issues that matter. "Media is constantly trying to
tell teenagers how to act, what to think, and what to wear," John
said. We thought it’d be important to have a magazine for teenagers
where they control the agenda."
"It’s not only
empowering for the kids who write but empowering for the kids who read
it and feel like, ‘I’m not alone. I really am not going through this
really scary period of teenagedom by myself," said Stephanie, who
serves as the magazine’s editor.
In a recent issue, a teen wrote
about the anguish of living with a stutter: "Why must my stutter
define me? Why must I feel like a fool in the simplest of social
situations?" Another teen described her anorexia and bulimia and
explained how a friend was helping her through the struggle:
"Sitting between Misty and Sean, watching them shovel pizza and ice
cream into their mouths, my stomach quivered. It had been months since
I’d eaten anything like that. I could feel my mouth starting to water.
Abruptly, I shoved my chair away from the table, knocking it over, and
walked away, shocking my best friend Jeanie, who was the only one who
knew my secret."
The emotional subjects that fill some of
the magazine’s 46 pages - love, loss, fitting in, getting along with
families, depression - are balanced with opinion and entertainment
pieces. In this same issue, another teen gave her thoughts on juveniles
and the death penalty. Another reviewed the band Travis. Two others
critiqued the movies "13 Going on 30"and "Secret
Window."
When the Meyers started the magazine, they were
raising two teenagers and felt there were too few opportunities in many
schools for students to express their views.
‘We’ve always felt
passionate about issues of young people," said John, a former
publisher of insurance trade magazines. Stephanie was a social worker
and a teacher. A magazine for teens was a natural fit for them.
"Back then, we got voting records from the towns along Route 128
and found families who had teenagers, and mailed a flyer that said we
were going to start a magazine," John said. "If your children
would like to send in an article, we would consider it for
publication."
Within weeks, they received enough responses
to publish the first issue, a 24-page magazine they called The 21st
Century. They pieced it together the "old-fashioned paste-up
way" and had it printed. They mailed it, free of charge, to
hundreds of households in the area. The demand for the magazine rose,
and the submissions kept coming. The Meyers quickly realized the
magazine’s potential - teens wanted to read voices that resonated with
their own lives.
The Meyers set up a nonprofit company, the
Young Authors Foundation, to solicit donations and keep the magazine
running. For several years they sent copies to families with teenagers,
but eventually they found it too difficult to sustain the magazine that
way. As teens grew older, it was too hard to keep track of who was still
living at home and who had gone off to college.
Around the same
time, teachers began to contact the Meyers for the magazine after
students brought in copies. "Eventually, we switched the
circulation from the kids who were a revolving door and established a
steady base of English teachers and librarians," John said. So they
sold subscriptions to schools as well as families, and changed the
magazine’s name to Teen Ink.
What was born in the Meyers’
basement has grown into a small publishing enterprise. Now they raise
money to finance Teen Ink through advertisers, corporate sponsors, and
gifts from companies such as Pepsi, the Disney Channel, Toyota, and
Random House. They have more than 5,000 junior high and high school
subscribers across the country.
Some teachers use the magazines
as a teaching tool. "To have models from real kids makes a kid
realize, ‘I can do that,’ and that’s huge in encouraging them to take a
risk and write about something important to them," said Kathy
Greenwood, an English teacher at a high school in Bedford, N.Y.
The magazine has also provided opportunities for teenagers, who’ve
interviewed celebrities ranging from Hillary Rodham Clinton and Colin
Powell to Maya Angelou and R. L. Stine.
Rosie Hilliard, a senior
at Scituate High School, has sent several opinion articles to Teen Ink
over the years. The Meyers noticed the color and clarity in Hilliard’s
writing and asked her to interview Ira Glass, host of National Public
Radio’s "This American Live," for the magazine. So Hilliard
and another teen, Blair Hurley of Newton, met with Glass after a
speaking engagement in Boston last year.
"We were only
supposed to interview him for 15 minutes, because he was going out to
dinner, but then it turned into 45 minutes and then an hour,"
Hilliard said. "It was really, really neat. It was one of the most
amazing things that’s ever happened to me. ... I really want to major in
English now, maybe journalism."
For Hurley, the interview
with Glass helped boost her confidence. "I’m a timid person by
nature," she said. "Since then, I’ve become a leader in my
school, and I started a creative writing club."
In 2000,
John Meyer struck a deal with Health Communications Inc., the publisher
of the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series. The publishing
house agreed to a Teen Ink series - an anthology of the best of teens’
personal stories and creative work from the magazine’s pages. So far,
six have been published, with celebrity endorsements on the book
jackets.
Three more Teen Ink books are planned by next year on
single issues - divorce, sexuality, and stereotyping.
"The
books immortalize the wonderful pieces by these kids," Stephanie
said.
The Meyers receive hundreds of stories, articles, and
poems a day from teenagers, and they’re often asked what they look for
when deciding what to publish. Stephanie said she looks for writing
that’s original and conveys and image that’s particularly telling or
vivid. She makes only slight editorial corrections.
"If a
poem says, ‘I love you, and you are the sweetest person in the world,’
that’s probably not going to get published," she said.
The
Meyers rarely meet any of the teenagers whose writing they publish and
know nothing about their academic achievements. "We don’t know if
they’re the brightest kid in the class or the lowest-level
student," John said. "Every piece gets read with the same eye.
The playing field is leveled on that basis."
And while
teens are Teen Ink’s target audience, that magazine and books are also
aimed at reaching a second group: parents.
"We think that
not only are teens enriched, but we as adults are enormously enriched
because of the talents and creativity young people have," John
said, "and if you give them a chance to express themselves and if
you’re willing to listen, we can learn a lot from them." n
Reprinted with permission from The Boston Globe, Monday, October 11, 2004
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