We Want Media

Magazines are a fragile, fragile medium. In the young year that is 2006, Cargo, Celebrity Living and Elle Girl have all bit the dust and more (SPIN I'm looking at you) might be on their way. But a closer look at the most high profile closures of the year reveals starkly different reasons and unexpected motives behind ending the mags.

Both Cargo and Celebrity Living showed signs of failure, losing ad pages and lagging newsstand sales. But as Ad Age reports, Elle Girl was thriving, with ad pages jumping nearly 50% in a year and a 20% increase in paid circulation. So why would a young, successful magazine just shut down shop? To focus its energies online, of course.

Elle Girl couldn't be making a better move. Teenage girls live online. Already, CosmoGIRL! and Seventeen have pretty comprehensive looking websites, and Elle Girl isn't lagging far behind. But in a thoroughly saturated market, narrowing its attention to the web should allow Elle Girl to do what seems so hard to do in print: stand out. With a demographic that turns over about every three years, Elle Girl will stand to grab young readers before their competitors by being the most web friendly.

We already know that the online magazine works for the older crowd (Slate, Salon) and Elle Girl is betting it will work for the MySpace crowd. With the rampant web obsession of teens, I’d say they are betting right.