This morning Ypulse friend/former ELLEgirl editor Melissa Walker and her former co-worker/current partner Anne Ichikawa sent out a press release announcing their latest venture — "I Heart Daily," a free email newsletter and website dedicated to turning teens on to some of their favorite things in entertainment, fashion, etc. Essentially, a DailyCandy for teen girls. All I have to say? Good call, ladies.

If ever there was a time to adopt this type of business model — free content delivered straight to readers' inboxes and/or RSS feeds — it's now. Because while most mags have websites (and as of late they've certainly been pumping that virtual real estate for all its worth) the idea of an online destination with no strings (read: paid subscriptions) attached seems like a refreshing and welcome change. From the release:

With only a handful of teen titles left in print after the loss of YM, ELLEgirl, Teen People and COSMOgirl! in the last few years, it's blatantly evident that this highly desirable audience seeks out and expects to find quality, original content online.

Anne and Melissa are passionate about being leaders in this burgeoning virtual realm. "During our years in print, we realized that magazine websites were often an afterthought, running repurposed magazine pieces, stories that were killed, or content that was deemed 'not good enough' for print. Lame." 

Lame, indeed. Of course, there's still the question of how this "highly desirable audience" will come across the newsletter/site, but after taking a glance for myself my feeling is that when they do they won't be disappointed.

Categorized under: Magazines, Web

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