Last year Sara Moonves, the editor in chief of W magazine, got a text message from Sofia Coppola, a director whose films draw from girlhood ennui the way Monet drew from ponds.
“Would you ever want to talk about doing a teen W?” Coppola asked.
To herself, Moonves, 41, thought: “My younger self would be dying right now.” To Coppola, 55, she replied: “I have binders of research for it.”
Moonves grew up in Los Angeles, reading Tiger Beat, Sassy and Teen Vogue, papering her walls with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonathan Taylor Thomas. (Never mind that Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, her best friends then and now, were often pictured in the same magazines.)
But that once-flourishing landscape of tween magazines has grown barren. Teen Vogue, which employed Moonves as an intern in the early aughts, was downsized and folded into Vogue.com last year. Seventeen stopped publishing print issues in 2018. Sassy (the alt-girl Bible) and Tiger Beat (the opposite) are no more.
Fashion magazines, which were supposed to welcome readers of those titles as they matured, haven’t fared much better. This spring, Glamour pivoted to affiliate shopping links. During the pandemic, onetime monthlies like Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire began cutting their print issues to four or two per year. The alpha, Vogue, releases eight slim volumes annually, as Anna Wintour, its 76-year-old global editorial director, watches her power dwindle.
Yet Moonves saw an opening.
In 2020, at 35 and just one year into her editorship, she rescued W from extinction-by-sale by recruiting a group of starry investors and an operating partner, Bustle Digital Group. Overnight, Moonves became the rare magazine editor who presided over the business, too, as W Media’s now chief executive. By 2024, print issues swelled from four a year to seven.
The magazine, founded in 1972 and once owned by Condé Nast, is today best known for depicting Hollywood through an art-world lens — hiring Wolfgang Tillmans, for example, to shoot Jennifer Lawrence — while still leaning into celebrity TikToks and Instagram Reels, like every other publisher.
And Moonves is known as a front-row fixture and a consummate late-night party hostess, exacting in her image-making but loose with her laughter. In November, Lawrence presented her with an award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. (Moonves thanked her mother, who attended the ceremony. She made no mention of her father, Leslie Moonves, the former CBS chief accused of sexual assault, whom she does not publicly discuss.)
In her CFDA acceptance speech, Moonves teased a “little-known fact” that she appeared in a handful of episodes of “Full House” as a girl. “So my career could have gone in a really different direction,” she said.
In some ways, though, her career did bring her back to her girlhood.
W Media had considered acquisitions of other print magazines, but nothing captivated Moonves quite like the nostalgia Coppola had provoked. Where were today’s teenagers supposed to find things to paper their walls? Instagram feeds?
Coppola put her in touch with Ava Nirui, 35, an Australian-born fashion bootlegger who went on to run Heaven, a youth-focused line from Marc Jacobs. Since March, the two have been working on a magazine that they describe as a “teenage sister” to W.
Called WYouth, the new publication represents a bet that teen magazines can be not only resuscitated, but made fresh for 2026. It also raises questions: Can a new print product get off the ground in today’s fluid and wobbly magazine landscape? And how will it be able to compete with social media for teenagers’ attention?
Nirui thinks the magazine, which releases its first issue on Sept. 15, is perfectly timed for a generation that seems to be tiring of endless digital stimulation.
“The kids are yearning for pre-internet times,” she said. “They want something that they can pull out of their bag and share and enjoy with their friends. Like, they can’t scroll past this stuff.”
On a drizzly day in August, the two editors sat across from each other in Moonves’s office high above Lower Manhattan. She picked up the first issue of WYouth — pronounced “double youth” — and placed it with a thump on the table between them.
On its cover was a photo that Hailey and Justin Bieber had taken of themselves with a Contax point-and-shoot camera, mid-make-out. The image was cropped tightly enough to appreciate individual strands of Hailey’s hair and the twinkle of Justin’s nose ring.
The magazine will be published twice a year, although its articles will also appear in a dedicated tab on W’s website. The cover of “Little W,” as the two editors call it, is exactly half the size of that of “Big W.” At 182 pages, it’s longer than Elle but shorter than this September’s Vogue.
Inside, there was plenty of the stuff of old teen magazines: horoscopes, a quiz about toxic BFFs and interviews with young stars like Clairo, who was interviewed by Charli XCX. There were covetable fashion spreads, including a feature shot by the Japanese photographer Shoichi Aoki. And there were occasional glimpses of the news, like an essay by a teenager about taking classes in a Sears building after Palisades Charter High School burned down in the California wildfires.
The goal was for the magazine to blend beauty and aspiration with a “relatable, scrapbook-y feeling,” Nirui said. She said she hoped readers would cut up pages of paper dolls that can be dressed in Calvin Klein tank tops and Prada sunglasses.
Its pages were filled with enough luxury goods, in fact, to make a reader wonder: What age group is this magazine for? (Both Coppola and her 16-year-old daughter, Cosima, are contributing editors.)
“It’s the No. 1 question we get, and it’s totally impossible to answer,” Moonves said.
“I think it’s dangerous to put an age on it,” Nirui added.
Moonves also declined to say how much money had gone into the youth magazine. The new title generated excitement among advertisers, she said, attracting “new, young” brands as well as “Big W” mainstays including Dior, Chanel, Loewe and Saint Laurent.
“The thing that people are always shocked to hear is that print is, by a landslide, our biggest source of revenue,” Moonves said. (That’s from advertising, not subscriptions.) For WYouth, the bigger question she and her team had to consider was: “Even if it wasn’t going to make tons of money right away, was it going to be hurtful to the company or helpful to the company?”
Elsewhere in the teen magazine universe, publications have had to make drastic changes to remain afloat. Teen Vogue, which was introduced by Condé Nast in 2003, stayed current throughout the 2010s in part by broadening its coverage into progressive politics.
Since merging with Vogue.com last year, Teen Vogue’s web presence has emphasized young adult fandom (TV shows like “Sterling Point”), celebrities (the figure skater Alysa Liu) and creative hobbies (building cyberdecks). But the site’s political coverage is not gone, said Mi-Anne Chan, who took over as creative editorial director in February.
“People think it’s dead,” she said, pointing to a recent panel about teenagers’ political priorities at Teen Vogue Fest and the website’s coverage of student walkouts to protest ICE. “It’s not dead.”
“People keep asking me what I think about WYouth entering, and I think it’s good,” she added. “I think it’s good that people are investing in teen magazines.”
In late August, a reporter visited Casa Magazines in the West Village, hoping to ask teenagers what publications appealed to them. But there were no teenagers in sight.
“The only magazines I see are in my bathroom,” said Emerson Jordan, 13, who was visiting Manhattan from New Jersey for some back-to-school shopping with friends and wandering down Spring Street with Edikted and PacSun shopping bags (and an adult chaperone).
The soon-to-be eighth-grade girls said that they liked to read about fashion, sports and young musicians but that they didn’t always want to do it on screens. If a magazine came out geared toward their age group, would they be interested?
“Yeah,” one 14-year-old said.
“Yeah,” another added.
A third nodded her head: “Definitely.”
