New Moon Girls

There is a particular kind of media company that the market keeps insisting cannot exist. It has no advertising, which is the entire revenue model of magazine publishing. Its writers are children, who cannot legally sign a contract. Its subject - the inner lives of girls between the ages of eight and fourteen - is one the industry has historically decided will not sell unless it is wrapped in glitter and a discount code. New Moon Girls is that company, and it has been ignoring the market's insistence since March 1993.

The founding is almost too tidy. Nancy Gruver and Joe Kelly, parents of twin daughters named Nia and Mavis, watched their kids approach adolescence and remembered how much of their own confidence they had misplaced somewhere in the same years. The available media told girls what to buy, what to weigh, and whom to like. It did not, as far as anyone could tell, ask them what they thought. So the family started a magazine in Duluth, Minnesota, and made a decision that turned out to be the whole business: roughly ninety-five percent of every issue would be written and illustrated by girls themselves.

This is a stranger commitment than it sounds. Most publications that claim to be "for" a young audience are in fact written by adults performing a guess at that audience, then tested against it. New Moon Girls inverted the arrangement. The girls are the contributors, the editorial voice, and the readership all at once. The adults on staff moderate, produce, and stay out of the way. It is a newsroom whose staff has not yet finished middle school.

You can read the entire philosophy in the table of contents, which is the sort of detail that tells you more than any mission statement. There is a section called "Herstory," which introduces readers to women history skipped. There is "Global Village," about girls in other countries, and "Women's Work," profiling a woman in an interesting job. "Girls on the Go" covers activism and the things girls make. "Ask A Girl" is a peer-advice column - girls helping girls with problems - that predated the entire architecture of the modern internet by a decade. When your section names double as a manifesto, you have branding that no agency could improve.

The no-advertising rule is the part that makes publishers wince. Take the ads out of a magazine and you have removed the thing that pays for it. But an ad-free magazine is also a magazine that answers to exactly one constituency: the people reading it. There is no advertiser to keep comfortable, no page of content shaped around a page of product. In an attention economy that meters children's data by the pound, that restraint has aged from quaint into something closer to a design principle worth stealing.

The awards followed, which is mildly funny given the industry's skepticism. New Moon collected nine Parents' Choice Foundation Awards, including the 2008 Gold Award for best children's magazine, plus the Association of Educational Publishers' Golden Lamp, a Folio, several design-and-editorial honors, and recognition for multicultural education. A trophy case most publishers would envy, assembled by an editorial board of tweens working without ad dollars.

Then the company did the thing most legacy print titles could not: it moved. In 2008 it launched NewMoonGirls.com, a moderated online community where girls run chats, take polls and quizzes, share art and writing, and continue the "Ask A Girl" tradition in a space designed to be safe rather than viral. Under Gruver, the operation shifted from a single Minnesota office to a fully virtual organization, with staff, freelancers, and members participating from around the world - remote-first years before LinkedIn made a buzzword of it. The mission designed the org chart: girls are everywhere, so the newsroom is too. The company is now run from Richmond, California, still small, still ad-free, still handing over the pen.