New Christian magazine for teens launches

Music, films, books, fashion and a hefty helping of God will be served up in a new magazine out next month aimed at Christian teenagers.

Streetbrand has had a relatively successful website for the past few years (10,000 hits per month+) and is bringing out its first new print edition next month.

The magazine is the brainchild of Kofo Baptist, a Pentecostal mother of two from Dagenham, who believes there's a gap in the market for Christian teens who may be turned off by the Nuts and Zoos of this world and are looking for something a little more wholesome but streetwise. 

"What we want to do is create a space where Christian teenagers of all denominations can come together and talk about their experiences," she tells me. 

In the States Christian bookshops are now filled with a vast array of trendy but godly magazines so it will be interesting to see whether Streetwise catches on here.

In the current climate of scant advertising revenue and free content on the internet launching a new magazine is a notoriously tricky affair, but specialty subjects like religion may be able to sail against the prevailing winds. 

Over the past few years, for instance, there has been a real flourishing of trendy Muslim lifestyle magazines - Emel, Q-News and Sisters to name just a few. So it will be interesting to see whether a similar sort of Christian magazine can do the same. 

Kofo tells me the mag will get a soft launch to begin with – an initial print run of 3,000 which will just go out to Christian bookshops. The money behind it is all her own and she's just recently left her job as a charity worker to set up a graphic design business and run the magazine. Good luck to her, the more magazines on our bookshelves the merrier. 

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