Kerry Parnell: Forget TikTok and bring back those glossy teen magazines

Amid news Cosmopolitan magazine is going back into print, should we take the gloss off TikTok and revive the teen magazine scene, asks Kerry Parnell.

Bring back teenage magazines! With the news Cosmopolitan magazine is returning to Australia, let’s follow it up with teen titles.

Because frankly, where do girls get their advice from now? TikTok? I think not. YouTube? It’s reely, reely bad.

As the former editor of a teen magazine and mum of pre-teens, I feel I am qualified to argue for the return of the baby glossies.

They were the ultimate safe space for age-appropriate content. But once the internet and social media took over, teenagers went from kids’ content to an adult free-for-all, in a great big black hole of bilge.

Now Gen Z and Alpha are either goggle-eyed at TikTok or buried in YouTube, where they have an alternative world, with its own celebrities, information and entertainment.

Annie Jones on the cover of Dolly magazine 1981. Picture: Supplied

Throwback to 1983, with Nicole Kidman on a Dolly cover.

They can watch “hilarious” pranks, make-up tutorials, people weeping and gamers twiddling their joysticks (this one is eternally perplexing, but my kids love them).

The problem is, there’s no filter and while it might feel like a forum full of “people just like me”, it also dishes up dangerous adult content. It’s literally a minefield.

Girlfriend magazine in 2002.

Teen secrets exposed in Girlfriend mag.

Which is why teenage magazines were so great. In the ’80s and ’90s, the teen mag was queen.

When I was growing up, I absolutely loved them – the fashion, the features, the reporters.

I would analyse the staff list and dream of seeing my name there one day. And so, I made it happen – working my way up, becoming deputy, then acting editor of Girlfriend magazine in Australia and editor of Bliss magazine, in the UK.

What a time it was in the ’90s and noughties – everyone on those titles adored their jobs.

We were passionate about producing magazines that entertained and informed our young readers. It looked like a grown-up world, but it wasn’t, it was just for them.

We covered topics like health – explaining what was happening to their bodies – and sex and relationships.

This wasn’t always understood well.

In the 1990s one furious British MP, Peter Luff, tried to get teenage magazines age-restricted, after he discovered his daughter reading one.

He wanted to put age stickers on them and set up a special Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel.

It seems so naive, now, laughable.

Nobody had any idea what was coming.

So now, I really think, the very best thing would be to have teen magazines with curated content just for them.

Happily, Girlfriend is still going online, as is Teen Vogue and Seventeen in the USA, but Bliss, Sugar and Just 17 in the UK, have gone.

But if Cosmo can return to print, why not teen magazines?

Gen Z and Alpha love a bit of ’90s retro, after all and I reckon they’d go for a product which has all their likes in one place, plus, crucially, one which gives them good advice.

I remember running the annual survey in Girlfriend in the ’90s, which asked what readers were scared of. The top answer? Always spiders.

They’ve a lot more to be afraid of, now.

Originally published as Kerry Parnell: Forget TikTok and bring back those glossy teen magazines