ELLEgirl.com Relaunching Monday
Posted by anastasia on 10-20-2006
I posted this in Essentials yesterday but I think it's worth another post, especially since they put a screen shot out. The print version may be dead, but ELLEgirl.com is attempting to come out strong by relaunching itself as a 2.0 online teen magazine. From their press release:
"Jack Kliger, President and CEO, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., announced today that ELLEgirl.com will relaunch on October 23, 2006 with multiple digital platforms — including daily mobile text alerts and online video — expanded editorial content and a new online section that allows teens to personalize the site with select content. The redesign of the website and introduction of ELLEgirl mobile offers readers a more diverse user-experience and sense of community. Target is the exclusive advertiser of all new technology for the first month following the launch of the new ELLEgirl.com. This includes the ELLEgirl.com mobile site, text message club and editorial videos."
For some reason I found this tidbit at the end pretty funny:
"A moderator panel composed of aspiring web journalists from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism will moderate the updated ELLEgirl.com chat rooms and message boards for inappropriate content, while cultivating leaders in the ELLEgirl.com community."
Maybe just because it's funny to think of aspiring journalists from one of the country's top J-schools moderating a teen site, but hey, I went to the Medill grad program in 1999 (Northwestern University's J-school) and shoveled Tribune content into Storyserver (the content management system they had then) as my internship. It's the non-journalism reality of many new media internships.
P.S. ELLEgirl.com's executive editor Anne Sachs has RSVPd to the NYC Ypulse Teen Media Mashup and will be adding her perspective on "The Future of Teen Magazines." This event is ALMOST FULL. So I strongly encourage you to RSVP now if you have been putting it off.
Read the stories on this in MediaWeek and the Media Post (reg. required).
On a related note, the Media Post also has a story on celebrity weeklies' banner year and blames Teen People's demise on the proliferation of these gossip mags.
