About YM

YM

YM was an American magazine for teenage girls, published in New York, latterly by Gruner + Jahr USA. Published for seventy-two years, it was the second-oldest girls' magazine in the United States, behind only Seventeen. Its initials stood, at different times, for Young Miss, Young & Modern and Your Magazine, and generations of readers knew it for fashion, beauty, celebrity coverage, advice — and above all for "Say Anything," its famous column of readers' embarrassing moments. YM ceased publication in 2004, when Condé Nast bought its assets and transferred its subscribers to Teen Vogue.

The magazine's long life, from the early 1930s to the early 2000s, makes it a record of how American publishing understood teenage girls: first as children to be guided with comics and stories, then as young consumers with their own fashion, music and emotional lives.

Origins: Compact and Calling All Girls

YM began as two separate magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. Compact, first published in 1932, was aimed at older teenagers. Calling All Girls, intended for younger girls, began in July 1941, growing out of a teen column in Parents' Magazine that had drawn a strong reader response. It is often described as the first magazine for girls, mixing comics, fashion advice and short stories.

Calling All Girls started as a quarterly but quickly became monthly as its popularity grew; by 1945 it was selling about 500,000 copies an issue, with an average reader aged about thirteen. Its emphasis on comics, however, limited its appeal to older teenagers and to fashion advertisers, which set up the logic of combining the two titles into a single magazine that could follow a reader through adolescence.

Young Miss and the Digest Years

By the late 1940s the two publications had merged into Young Miss, a small, digest-sized magazine. The digest format suited postwar reading habits and kept the title distinct from the larger, glossier Seventeen. In the 1960s the magazine's size was increased, reflecting both rising advertising expectations and the growing importance of the teenage market to publishers and retailers.

Through these decades the magazine's formula settled into the one readers would recognize for the rest of its life: fashion and beauty presented for ordinary girls rather than models, short fiction, advice about school, family and friendships, and heavy participation from readers themselves, whose letters, questions and confessions filled its most-loved pages.

Say Anything and the Reader's Voice

The magazine's signature feature was "Say Anything," the embarrassing-moments column pioneered by Calling All Girls and carried through its successor titles. Readers sent in short accounts of mortifying experiences — mishaps at school, in front of a crush, or in public — and the column turned adolescent humiliation into shared comedy. It was popular enough to be collected in book form as The Best of Say Anything.

The column mattered because it reversed the usual direction of a teen magazine. Instead of adults and editors instructing girls from above, "Say Anything" let readers speak to each other, and its lesson — that everyone had survived an awful moment — was genuinely consoling. Imitations appeared across the teen-magazine field, but the feature remained most closely identified with YM and its predecessors.

Young & Modern Under Bonnie Fuller

In the 1980s the title changed again, to Young & Modern, under editor-in-chief Bonnie Fuller. Fuller, who went on to become one of the most powerful editors in American celebrity publishing, sharpened the magazine's focus on the contemporary teenage girl: her clothes, her music, her relationships and her anxieties, presented in a brighter, more news-driven package than the digest-era Young Miss.

The retitling also explains the durability of the initials. Each generation of editors could pour new meaning into "YM" without abandoning the recognition the letters had accumulated since the 1930s — an early example of a magazine brand being managed as an abbreviation rather than a phrase.

The Gruner + Jahr Years and Christina Kelly

By the 1990s YM was published by Gruner + Jahr USA, the American arm of the German publishing house, which had entered the United States market with titles including Parents and YM. The magazine competed directly with Seventeen, Sassy, Teen and later Teen People and Elle Girl for the attention of teenage girls and the advertisers who wanted to reach them.

Editor Christina Kelly, a founding editor of Sassy who had also helped found Jane, became YM's executive editor in 2000 and editor-in-chief in September 2001, succeeding Annemarie Iverson, who moved to Seventeen. Kelly used the job to argue, publicly, for a more responsible teen magazine: she removed diet stories, wary of their effect on self-conscious readers, and added longer, more substantial features alongside the fashion and beauty coverage readers expected. Her tenure became a reference point in debates about what teen magazines owed their readers.

Content and Covers in the Final Era

In its last years YM was a full-size glossy monthly covering fashion, beauty, horoscopes, quizzes, advice and the celebrity culture of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Its covers and posters featured the era's teen idols — pop groups such as *NSYNC and Hanson, singers such as Britney Spears and Madonna in "20 Questions"-style features, and television and film stars familiar from the period's teen hits.

The magazine also ran features that reached beyond entertainment, including its "21 Coolest Girls in America" franchise, which in 2001 honored, among others, a young student activist recognized for taking part in a campus labor sit-in — an inclusion that itself sparked discussion about the mixture of politics and conformity in teen media. That mixture, earnest and commercial at once, was characteristic of YM's final incarnation.

The Final Title Change and Closure in 2004

The last retitling came in 2000, when YM was said to stand for Your Magazine, though readers and the industry continued simply to call it YM. The new name did not reverse the pressures on the teen category: readers were migrating online, and Condé Nast's launch of Teen Vogue in 2003 gave advertisers a newer, fashion-led way to reach the same audience.

In October 2004 Condé Nast announced it had purchased certain assets of YM from Gruner + Jahr: the subscription file, the title and brand name, rights to its special publication titles, the ym.com domain and its newsstand pockets. Condé Nast's plan was explicit — to close YM and move its roughly 1.2 million subscribers to Teen Vogue, whose rate base rose accordingly with the February 2005 issue. YM's final issue was the December/January issue, its cover featuring the singer Usher.

What Replaced It

Subscribers who had paid for YM began receiving Teen Vogue instead, and the YM web address pointed readers toward the replacement title. The episode was an early, clear example of a pattern that would become common in 2000s magazine publishing: a venerable title was worth more to a competitor as a subscription list and a newsstand position than it was to its own publisher as a going concern.

YM was not the only casualty of the period. Under Kelly, remarkably, three teen titles folded in succession — Sassy, YM and Elle Girl, which closed after only a handful of issues under her editorship. The teen magazine category, once a reliable ladder into adult women's magazines, contracted sharply as its audience moved to the internet.

Legacy

YM's legacy rests on longevity and intimacy. For seventy-two years, through four names, it addressed girls at an age when print was often their first private media — bought with their own money, passed between friends and kept in bedrooms. Its embarrassing-moments column gave that audience a voice in its own pages decades before social media made reader participation the norm.

The magazine is also a case study in how teen media negotiated responsibility. Its final editor fought to remove diet content and add substance while keeping the fashion, beauty and celebrity coverage its readers demanded. That unresolved argument — between giving teenage girls what they ask for and giving them what adults think they need — outlived YM and continues wherever media is made for the young.