It’s a teenage rite of passage to invent new worlds: worlds of the imagination, gangs, cliques and clubs, worlds apart from adults. And then came the Internet, where anyone can be anything, a meta-persona of your own choosing. There are hundreds of millions of blogs; a new one is created each second — many by teenagers.
Most are probably adolescent doodlings, some may be undiscovered gems. And then there are the blogs which — usually with a fair bit of luck — suddenly set the blogosphere abuzz. Usually, these are sites that look and read more like the next generation of “e-zine” than something knocked out in a 15-year-old’s bedroom.
Such blogs from all over the world (although most commonly the US) attract tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of readers a month. They can pull in advertising revenues (albeit small), and their creators become stars when they come to the attention of the mainstream media. Tavi Williams, a 13-year-old self-confessed “dork,” became an influential player in the fashion world almost overnight after her Style Rookie blog was featured in the New York Times last year.
You can understand the paper’s interest. Adults have always been desperate to get an insight into what teens are thinking, and business even more so. Somewhere out there is the New Next Big Thing and it’s almost certainly being dreamed up by a bunch of teenagers. Even Katie Grand, stylist, editor and one of the most influential women in fashion, has devoted the second issue of her magazine, Love, to teens, with bloggers to the fore.
“The fashion industry is really aware at the moment that it has to look at new territories,” Grand said. “When I was having meetings with advertisers for this issue, two big Italian houses said they felt that their clients were getting older and they weren’t looking at the youth market enough.
“The difficult part was motivating anyone from that teen age group to get involved with a magazine. Very few kids are bothered about the printed word; we would work really hard on finding these kids, but then you’d get a call at six in the morning saying, ‘I’ve missed my train, so I’m not coming to the photo shoot,’” she said.
Tavi is the queen of the teen bloggers, and fashion houses have gone out of their way to court her. For a time, there was a suspicion her blog was so professional that it must be a stunt created by industry insiders, but she appears to be the real deal: a 13-year-old who has something to say and can say it well.
“Kids often start writing blogs just for the hell of it,” said Sadie Stein, a contributing editor at the US online feminist fashion mag, Jezebel. “Sometimes it’s because they are feeling isolated in small conservative towns and want to connect with other kids; sometimes it’s because they have areas of specialized interest they want to share.”
Two teenaged examples that have grown into serious sites are Philadelphian gastro-obsessive Nick Normile’s Foodie at Fifteen and, in the UK, Charlie Lyne’s movie-mad Ultra Culture.
“The key to getting a higher profile,” Stein said, “is to get linked to better known Web sites. But to make it really big, ironically you need to get noticed by the established print media: a mention in a well-known newspaper can massively increase the number of hits a Web site gets overnight. And getting picked up in this way is usually down either to luck or good self-promotion — neither of which has much to do with the quality of the blog itself.”
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