How To Pitch For PR: Seventeen

RELATED: How To Pitch for PR: Cosmopolitan How To Pitch: Seventeen Take a public relations course

Background: The 1944 brainchild of media tycoon Walter Annenberg, Seventeen found its sure footing in the 1950's as one of the first publications to track trends among teens -- and target advertising accordingly. When a growing number of American school girls were wasting little time between graduating high school and becoming wives and mothers, Annenberg and his sister Enid Haupt, the pub's editor-in-chief, saw to it that ads for appliances, china, and silver ran alongside the magazine's fashion and cosmetics marketing mainstays. The outlet even launched its own series of young homemaker how-to books including The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining.

A Hearst family member since 2003, Seventeen has remained a leader among 12- to 19-year-old girls by continuing to follow the zeitgeist, even if that means scrapping articles on how to remove laundry stains in favor of those underscoring what current editor-in-chief Ann Shoket says is the magazine's mantra: "It's fun to be Seventeen." Shoket says that while at its core, Seventeen is a fashion and beauty magazine, "every single thing we do has to be crazy, delicious, insane, fun. So, even when we're talking about very serious issues -- teen pregnancy, dating abuse, eating disorders -- we don't want girls to feel like they're taking their medicine when they're reading the magazine."...

The How to Pitch series is worth its weight in gold. In just the first month I'd already benefited enough to consider the cost of joining well worth it. -- Gaen Murphree