I don’t think of my podcast as being about TEEN PEOPLE magazine: it’s about my guests, and why they were in TEEN PEOPLE, and what they’re up to now in their 30s and 40s. But January 2023 is the 25th anniversary of TEEN PEOPLE, so I thought I’d celebrate with an episode featuring a few of the guests I’ve interviewed since I started this podcast in the spring of 2020!

TEEN PEOPLE was founded in 1998, and was published until 2006. While their bread and butter was celebrities, their heart and soul was “real teen content".

Where are these "real teens" now? That's the premise of this podcast. (If you love this idea as much as I do, leave a rating or review!)

In the 2000s, content by and for "real people" took off. From Tavi Gevinson's Style Rookie, to reality TV, and Humans of New York, people were hungry for media in which they could see themselves. TEEN PEOPLE helped popularize that trend with their own focus on real teens. (Remember: this was before social media made it possible to reach a global audience with the tap of a button!)

This episode features clips from my first two seasons, including interviews with Caron Levis, Gennie Gorback, Robin Knudsen, Zena Burns, Dr. Ben Barry, and James Frankie Thomas. You can find their episodes in seasons one and two of Teen People!

Notes:

Intro music: RomanBelov on Pixabay

Outro music (edited for length): Fog Lake, 'Roswell'. Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0): www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Tag me: I'm on Twitter and Instagram at TeenPeoplePod.

Teen People is recorded in Kingston/Katarokwi, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and the Huron-Wendat.