University of Mississippi

New Media Transformation 

New media has been an influence on children’s magazines since 1995. Although 

computer magazines for children existed as early as 1983, the Internet’s influence began about 

12 years later. One of the earliest children’s magazines to have an online presence, 

Sports 

Illustrated Kids

 embraced the World Wide Web in 1995. The magazine’s progressive publisher 

Cleary Simpson explained,  

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With kids you find a very different environment, edutainment. Online is beyond print and 

very complementary. But print magazines are always marketable, personable and 

portable. The way kids read magazines—they all save it and have every issue from the 

past five years and share it with friends. Seven or eight kids see each issue. Computer 

usage is very different.

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Simpson predicted the future for children’s magazines as being everywhere kids are—

online, television, other media, in school. “New media enhances what we can do for our 

audience. Kids don’t only learn by reading, they learn by watching and interacting. The 

magazine has always been interactive—write letters, magazine activities, and posing questions to 

answer in the magazine or in their minds.”

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 “We change with the kids,” 

Sports Illustrated Kids

 

research director Donna Sabino explained. “We talk to them to find out what appeals to them. If 

we hadn’t changed since 1989 I doubt we’d be as popular as we are.”

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Abrahamson’s 1996 predictions have proved accurate: “For the foreseeable future well 

into the twenty-first century, it is likely that the contemporary magazine, in its printed form, will 

continue to demonstrate its efficacy as a source of information and pleasure for its readers, its 

utility as a marketing vehicle for its advertisers, and its viability as a business enterprise for its 

publishers.”

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