Hearst’s Cosmo Girl to Fold with December Issue

This article is about Cosmo Girl, the once popular Hearst teen magazine producing its last issue, in December 2008. The teen magazine which is a spinoff, from Cosmopolitan, slowly started to crumble, with its title ad pages falling 15.5 percent to 527 this year through October. Similarly, in previous years, Elle Girl and Teen People also shut down, leaving Teen Vogue and Seventeen as the remaining teen magazines and making Cosmo Girl the 2nd that Hearst had folded this year.

Atoosa Rubenstein, founding editor of Cosmo Girl, believes that it’s the times we are living in, referring to the troubled economy, as well as the magazine itself, losing track of its roots, which was to serve as an alternative and to be the “little sister” to Seventeen subscribers. Also Tina Wells, head of teen research firm Buzz Marketing Group, believed that Cosmo Girl lost track of who their primary audience were, for example marketing it as the “tween book,” for the ages of 13 to 17 years old, but clearly having in last year’s November issue, articles including “College Life Uncensored” and “The Art of Co-Mance” which was a story on interoffice dating.
Others believed that it had nothing to do with the demographics, but having to do with the behavior and “shift in teen readership.”

Robin Stenberg suggests, “The teen today is aspiring up to read the mothership or celebrity titles. They are not walking away from magazines, but they are getting more sophisticated in title selection. They want something that speaks to them but doesn’t call them out in the title.” With the economic downturn and the changing behaviors to teen’s today, there is no way a magazine such as Cosmo Girl could ever survive, especially in losing site of its primary audience.