Mark Patricof doesn’t seem like the sort of guy who’d have a magazine with the face of Justin Bieber framed in bubbly shades of orange and pink on the cover sitting on his office coffee table. After all, Patricof is somewhere in early fities; he wears suits; his list of “notable investments” includes companies with names like BetterDoctor and Purchx. He looks like most guys you’d find in a very fancy office on Park Avenue, where the foyer is filled with shiny awards for things like “campaign innovation.”
“I was in Abu Dhabi last fall,” Patricof says, “and there it was on the newsstand. The kids still buy it for the posters. The print piece has kept it alive. I mean, no one’s giving them that sort of shelf space if it’s not selling. So I called them back, and I said we’ll buy it.”
Jon Premosh / BuzzFeed News
He's talking about Tiger Beat, the 50-year-old teen magazine known more for its abundance of cute teen boys than its journalism that he bought this past summer for $2 million. In 2003, the magazine had been sold to the founder Chuck Laufer’s son, Scott, who vowed to return it to its original teen dream glory. But limited resources and vision allowed the magazine to wither; today, most adults are surprised that it still existed in the first place. Patricof put together a team of investors that include America's Got Talent host and Mariah Carey's ex-husband Nick Cannon, who is also chair of TeenNick; NBA All-Star Kevin Durant; New York Giants chair and media mogul Steve Tisch; Fast and Furious producer Neal Moritz; and Scooter Braun, manager of Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, and Carly Rae Jepson — all people who can potentially expand the magazine's base — and kept Editor-in-Chief Leesa Coble, who's been with the magazine since 2001, in her job.
But when we first speak on the phone in early August — after news of the purchase was made public — he is still looking for a CEO. “I want Lena Dunham,” he says. “I have two daughters; I’m very focused on taking some of the fluff out of this thing. I see that you hung out with her. Can you just float the idea?”
Jon Premosh / BuzzFeed News
Patricof’s pitch for a Dunham-led Tiger Beat, even as Dunham ramps up for the launch of her own newsletter, suggests that Patricof knows what should, theoretically, work for the brand. But that doesn’t mean that it will. "We have every piece we need,” he told me. “And if we screw it up, we'll really feel stupid. But look, you can't tell kids something is cool. No one’s really been able to reach teen girls,” Patricof says. “My kids are addicted to Snapchat, but it’s a tool.”
And aside from Rookie, he’s not wrong. The way we use the internet, and the way teens use the internet in particular, is moving away from websites and homepages and toward content discoverable on various “tools” — whether Snapchat, Tumblr, Instagram, Vine, Twitter, or whatever’s next.
Tiger Beat plans to use all those tools, but it’s also remaining defiantly analog. Unlike other reboots of legacy publications (think Newsweek), the magazine itself — the actual, tangible, print magazine — will remain central. Because the one thing digital culture still hasn’t mastered is the production of the physical, fetishizable, tangible object. Which is precisely what Patricof is betting on: "Once you've made a connection with a magazine, it's a lifelong connection,” he says. “And you want people rooting for you. No one's rooting for [Tiger Beat’s competitors] Twist or J-14. Twist goes away and no one cares. This thing, people care about.” But do they?
Editor-in-Chief Leesa Coble
Macey Foronda / BuzzFeed News
Tiger Beat emerged amid a markedly different pop landscape, designed to exploit a teen demographic that, even in 1965, still evaded most marketers. But Charles “Chuck” Laufer learned about teens the easy way: by teaching high school in Beverly Hills. In 1955, Laufer, then 31, was fielding complaints from his female students that they had nothing fun to read. So he decided to fill that void himself, crafting a magazine — first called Coaster and swiftly renamed Teen — replete with details about the things he thought girls wanted to read about. Specifically: the array of teen idols that were emerging from film, television, and music to cater to a generation whose tastes were radically different than their parents’.
Jon Premosh / BuzzFeed News
Laufer taught journalism and English, but he had no skill for the business side of publishing, and sold the struggling Teen in 1957. But he kept his eye on the industry, and seven years later, published a Beatles “one-shot” (a one-off magazine packed with pictures and trivia) that sold 750,000 copies in two days. He’d also been observing the state of the once-powerful fan magazines, which had built their names and circulation by working in close symbiotic relationship with the studios. The studios provided them with the raw material for stardom — endless glamour shots of their young talent, intimate interviews, confessional first-person stories — and the slew of Hollywood fan magazines spread the word.
The collapse of the studio system in the ‘50s would fundamentally alter the fan magazine’s modus operandi — and precipitate its slow death over the next three decades. And even as magazines attempted to grasp at the expanding teen audience by playing up teen television hotties like Ricky Nelson, their names (Photoplay, Screenland, Motion Picture, Modern Screen) became firmly associated with a) old Hollywood, and b) moms — anathema to teens obsessed with the new and the cool.
Enter Tiger Beat. “Tiger” was slang for “cute boy”; “beat” indicated how central music — the ‘60s teen medium of choice — would be to the magazine. And unlike the fan mags broadcasting Liz Taylor and Richard Burton’s latest romp, Tiger Beat kept its content strictly PG — there was never a hint of scandal or smut, just dreams of holding hands. The magazine was unabashed in its embrace of the teen audience and their sensibility: Every headline, even the most banal, ended with a flourish of punctuation, such as “David ordered a steak!”
Laufer also honed in on what he’d come to call “the look.” When he first launched in the magazine in 1965, he just put whoever was on the top of the Billboard charts on the cover. But Laufer quickly figured out that top of the charts wasn’t the same as who readers wanted to stare at. They’d put Paul Revere and the Raiders on the cover, but the fan letters that poured in weren’t for Revere, but for lead singer Mark Lindsay. With his plaintive face and big eyes, Lindsay had “the look” — not sexually threatening, cute, but not overly so, and feminine. “They all look like pretty girls,” Laufer told the New York Times in 1972.
Still, Laufer’s real genius was to collaborate closely with the source of stardom itself. He might never get actual access to the Beatles, but he could find his own potential stars — such as Davy Jones of the Monkees, whom he saw in a preview for the first episode of their namesake show and slapped on the cover of the magazine — nail a promotional deal with their publicity team, and, via constant coverage, transform a teen boy into a veritable teen idol. And when you make that idol yourself, your content stream is nearly unlimited, and easily spread across multiple spin-off titles, like Fave, essentially a repackaged Tiger Beat, and Right On!, which was marketed toward black audiences.
DJ Mohogany (left) and Leesa Coble (right) doing a Snapchat take-over.
Macey Foronda / BuzzFeed News
When it became clear that Partridge Family star David Cassidy was the hot new thing, Laufer partnered with the show’s production company to ensure a steady, and mutually beneficial, stream of publicity. When Cassidy’s appeal began to wane, Laufer opted to make his own stars. When a group of siblings from rural Ontario sent Tiger Beat their picture, he dubbed them “The DeFranco Family” and put 13-year-old Tony, who had “the look,” all over the magazine, effectively launching them to stardom. Laufer had turned himself into the classic Hollywood studio and the fan magazine: the best of both worlds.
Laufer also understood the profitability of these magazines wasn’t in subscriptions ($5 for a year) or ads. Instead, it was exploiting the depths of obsession via a vast web of what we’d call “swag”: Each magazine was chock full of offers for fan clubs ($3 for David Cassidy), offers for readers to complete their Tiger Beat collections through the purchase of back issues (75 cents a piece), an “Osmond Sweatshirt ($5) and “Donny Cap” ($5), the Tiger Beat Super Annual ($1.25), the “Star Address Book” ($1.25), selections from the Tiger Beat Paperback Library ($1 a piece for titles like The Secret Lives of Girl Stars, Brady Bunch in New York Mystery, and Stars & Their Pets), and “An Osmond Love Gift” ($2).
Those handfuls of crumpled dollar bills sent through the mail became hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in 1978, Laufer sold the magazine for a reported $15 million, with circulation cresting at 800,000. Over the next 30 years, the magazine changed hands multiple times before landing with Patricof’s groups of investors. Still, Patricof’s visions of expansion are strikingly similar to Laufer’s, just 40 years updated: It’s all about the swag and brand expansion. When Ariana Grande plays two shows in New York in late September, the magazine will host an “Ariana-inspired pop-up lounge,” with a photobooth that puts fans on Tiger Beat covers. Marketers are scheming for branded opportunities with all manner of entertainment and music producers. The faces and fashions may have changed, but the desire to own part of the aura of your crush remains constant.
There's a story that Mark Patricof likes to tell about the time he was in St. Barts with Nicole Richie and Jessica Alba — "I swear this isn't name-dropping; I've been friends with them a long time" — and their husbands. "One night, I feel my phone buzzing too much. And there’s 15 different texts, saying, ‘You’re in Us Magazine.’ Now all weekend, Jessica had been saying, ‘I don’t want to go to that restaurant, there’s too much paparazzi, I want to this other restaurant.’ That’s bullshit, because there’s these pictures right where we went — she tipped them all off! These magazines know what they’re doing.”
It’s Patricof’s way of illustrating his understanding of the celebrity industrial complex. “I’ve been around the entertainment business a long time,” he says. “I know how to navigate Hollywood flawlessly. And most people don’t. I don’t make mistakes. I know the publicists. I did my work before I bought the thing and put it together.”
So Tiger Beat can be a magazine that deftly navigates this world — which isn’t to say it'll start buying paparazzi photography. Rather, it'll maintain what Coble terms “very strong relationships” with Disney and Nickelodeon — and now Scooter Braun — which give the magazine access to stars (photos, interviews, public appearances). Tiger Beat then underlines the strains of those stars’ images that Disney, Nickelodeon, or Braun would like underlined.
“We’re on the same page,” Coble tells me when I visit the magazine’s temporary working space, sandwiched inside the offices of a hip West Hollywood production company. Coble, who started as an intern with the magazine in 2001, has short, bleach-blonde hair, the voice of an enthusiastic camp counselor, and an ageless look; in the photos of her with various teen idols that accompany her monthly editor’s letter, she passes for approximately the same age. “We have the same idea of promoting those people,” Cobble explains. “We all have the same objective in mind. That’s how I feel about the investors: Everyone has the same objective.”
Jon Premosh / BuzzFeed News
It’s an arrangement that recalls not only classic Hollywood, but also Laufer’s original strategy with the magazine. And while the magazine’s relationships with Nickelodeon and Disney have been cultivated for years, Patricof also has his star investors, a film producer brother, another brother who runs the Tribeca Film Festival, and his star friends, all of whom expand and fortify the magazine’s potential collaborations: “We have Durant,” Patricof explains, “so we might do things that are more male-oriented, or more urban-oriented.” It’s easy to imagine a future cover introducing one of Braun’s new finds — and, as such, equally easy to understand why Braun, whose website positions him as a mini–star-production company unto itself, was eager to invest.
Because while the the specific faces on the cover of Tiger Beat have changed — their hair gets longer, then shorter, then shaggier — the underlying ethos of teen idoldom, and the purpose of the magazine, have remained constant. Then as now, the magazine provides an outlet toward which young girls (and boys) can funnel their often overwhelming feelings of desire. It’s not sexual desire, at least not exactly — it’s obsession, the need to want something, to think about it constantly, to feel deeply. Tiger Beat not only validates those feelings, but also gives them shape — often in the form of a teen boy’s angelic face.
The first issue of Tiger Beat
Via wikipedia.org
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