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Spunk Online Youth Magazine

Contact details

Frank Bierens
Spunk
Prinsengracht 557
1016 HS Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Tel: +31 20 5707690
Fax: +31 20 5707699
Email: Frank Bierens
Website:www.spunk.nl

Location

Netherlands

Background

In The Netherlands teeneagers did not recognise themselves in the magazines that were published for their age group. The magazines are mostly marketing concepts that listen more to advertisers than to readers and they are produced by people in their twenties and thirties who think they know what young people would like to read, but in fact have no clue. In addition these magazines tend to focus on the fears of young people: do I have the right clothes, do I listen to the right music, and do I have enough sex as 16-year old?

Target audience & Involvement of children

Spunk is made be a editorial team of around fifteen people in the age between 14 and 20 years. They meet once a week and discuss their fascinations, dreams and worries in the wolrd and in their everyday life. This is what they turn into the editorial content. Besides daily weblogs and tv-tips, every day we publish at least one new article: either a column, interview, feature or animation. It results in a great mix of high and low culture. From reportages on young asylum seekers to sex columns, from reviews of musical clips to essays on the war in Iraq.
We have a special program to involve our readers in the problems of third world countries. With Spunk-journalists and young Dutch rappers we made a trip to Indonesia on child labour, to Honduras on youth gangs and to Sierra Leone on former child soldiers. The rappers make a rap song on their experiences and the young journalists a magazine on each trip. These materials are linked to text books and used in schools as additional teaching materials. This project is produced together with Plan Nederland.

Funders

We have a readership of 140.000 teenagers in The Netherlands and according to the reviews in the newspapers Spunk has an 'surprising' editorial quality.
We made alliances to the national newspaper NRC Handelsblad who publish every week one of the Spunk-columns in the weekend-section and have cross-links on their sites.

Future plans

This fall and winter four of the young writers from Spunk debute with a book in our newly launched book publishing company Spunk Books".

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