Loud and Clear
Magazine writing instructor Don Menn is trying to reach out to young
people with a magazine that speaks their language
By
Virginia Pelley
Of The SLUG! Staff
For some reason he takes the subway instead of a cab, though he
is at East
149th Street in New York, one of the roughest areas in Harlem. He sits
hugging
his brief case, surrounded by the graffiti-covered walls and seats of a New
York
City subway train. Everyone who enters the car, it seems, is a young
African-American male, except for Don Menn, the fifty-something white
magazine publisher and journalism professor from California, visiting to
research a story for his new magazine.
Several big guys sit all around him, checking him out, quiet and unsmiling.
"You were at our school today, weren't you?" one of them suddenly
says. "You
from that Loud Magazine out in California, right?"
Once Menn tells them that he is indeed the guy writing a story
about their
school for his new magazine -- since renamed M-Gen -- the young men
start talking
excitedly about Menn's article about their school, the Frederick Douglass
Academy, a phenomenally successful school that was once the worst in New
York.
The boys tell Menn about the business plans they will soon present to some
of
the top CEOs in the country -- one of Frederick Douglass' model programs.
The
kids talk over each other to Menn about their plans for the future like the
schoolboys that they are. Proud of themselves and their school, they urge
Menn
to come back and visit again.
The Frederick Douglass Academy -- where 95 percent of the
graduates now go on
to Ivy League colleges and whose motto is: "Nothing is impossible" -- is
exactly
the kind of story Menn wants to feature in M-Gen: the real lives of
American
youth, without sugar-coating or pandering to the mainstream. M-Gen
(which stands for "Millennium Generation"), will be a nationally distributed
monthly magazine for kids of both genders, ages 15 to 20 -- something that
has never before been done successfully. M-Gen's launch is set for
this September.
The idea for M-Gen germinated slowly over San Francisco State
University
instructor Menn's lengthy career in magazine writing and publishing. In his
16
years at Guitar Player, Menn says he did everything from "determining
the
editorial to taking out the garbage," and eventually began working on the
concept for a new magazine for GPI (Guitar Player International) called
Out
Loud, which was going to be a magazine for musicians just starting out
(read:
teen-agers).
That idea never came to fruition, but it started to shift Menn's
attention
toward the notion of youth culture and the mentors and heroes of this
generation (or more
specifically, the lack of them). At the same time, Menn was working with
at-risk high school students in East Palo Alto in a mentor program sponsored
by
Steve and Laurene Jobs.
"When I started doing research for Out Loud," Menn says, "I
realized that
there are no good magazines for teen-agers out there -- none. I started to
think
that there was a smart, motivated, active group of people out there who were
underserviced by the media."
After his years at Guitar Player and later as editor-in-chief of
Multimedia
World, Menn took a year off to spend with his teen-aged daughters. He
says
his house was "the cool place to hang out," and he spent a lot of time with
young people who inspired him to create a magazine for this "exploited and
misunderstood generation."
The M-Gen reader, according to Menn, is "outspoken, iconoclastic.
These
individuals, unlike their less adventurous peers, are keenly interested in
other
teen-agers -- especially those who are different form their own group. They
know when
they're being conned and when they're being condescended unto."
In June of 1997, Menn began discussions of the M-Gen concept in
earnest with
Anne Schukat, the 1997 class honoree at San Francisco State, who
triple-majored in
psychology, inter-arts and journalism. Currently in the graduate journalism
program at UC Berkeley, she is the acting editor of M-Gen, involved
in all
aspects of development.
"We want to show the wide diversity of who kids are, simply by presenting
them
as they already are," Menn says, explaining his view that "young people
learn
best from each other."
Menn, who is teaching Magazine Writing this semester, is intrigued by
research data indicating that "Generation Y," as it is called, is not as
slavishly worshipful of celebrity as the success of Teen People may
suggest. He is prepared for the possibility that M-Gen may be a
magnificent failure, but he is steadfastly striving to give young people a
straightforward, well-written and researched look at issues they care about.
"Kids are the future," he says, "They deserve to be treated with
respectŠnot as babe-a-licious hotties and shit like that."
The magazine's title will soon change again, possibly back to
Loud, as it
was when Menn visited Harlem last summer. Menn has been discussing the
online
business plan for M-Gen with Yahoo.
Earnestly yet simply, he explains that his vision for M-Gen is "to
give kids news they need and want in their voice. That's what we're trying to give
them: each other."
Don Menn will teach JOUR 500, Contemporary Magazine, in Fall 2000.
