Should Teen Magazines Move Toward the Blogosphere?

Old media wisdom would suggest that teenage spinoffs of popular magazines do more than just capture a broader market to generate advertising dollars. They tie girls to a particular magazine from a young age.

But magazines targeted at teenage girls have been tanking left and right recently. According to Anastasia Goodwin at Fast Company this is because young teenage girls–who have always read magazines targeted at older teens–are now graduating to “grownup” magazines like Elle and Cosmo at a younger age than they used to. And with the boom of user generated content–mostly in the form of social networking–it seems like the magazines targeted at this demographic are all but irrelevant.

Of all the contenders, Goodwin predicts that only Teen Vogue will survive in its current form because its primary topic is helping girls make trendy, high fashion looks work on a teen’s budget. Unlike Seventeen or Cosmo Girl, Teen Vogue will survive because it serves one pressing need for a lucrative niche market. Other magazines will need to move toward that same “long tail” model or face extinction.

All of this lead me to one glaringly obvious conclusion. Teen magazines need to start blogging post haste. Not one of the current contenders has so much as an RSS feed on their Website. With such a Web-oriented audience, no wonder they’re all facing extinction.

I’m not suggesting that Seventeen close the pages of its print edition forever, but adding a couple of single-topic blogs to its Website couldn’t hurt its goal of getting teenage girls reengaged with the magazine. At the very least, it could generate some additional advertising dollars.

Am I off base, or do you guys think this could work?