On Friday, Tavi Gevinson, the editor-in-chief and founder of Rookie, wrote in her monthly editor’s letter that the beloved online publication would be folding. Gevinson began Rookie in 2011, at the age of fifteen, on the heels of her forward-thinking fashion blog Style Rookie. For each issue of Rookie, she routinely wrote openhearted letters flecked with big ideas, lingering thoughts, asides, and pop-culture references, missives that delved into that given month’s editorial theme while imbuing parts of her own present. “Recent unease makes me wonder if closure is a myth; catharsis, too?,” she wrote to open the “Adventure” issue, from June, 2016. “I don’t think every transformative-feeling event is a total hoax, but it turns out that other facts of your life linger on past these revelations. Residue cannot be denied.”
Gevinson’s final letter, for November’s “Evolution” issue, is a sobering read. She describes her struggle to reckon with what initially drove her to start Rookie—“a response to feeling constantly marketed to in almost all forms of media; to being seen as a consumer rather than a reader or person”—and her discouragement with the compromises required to run a financially stable independent company at a time when digital media publications, even ones with supportive audiences, are outwardly struggling. “My resistance was confusing and painful to discover, and is at odds with how much Rookie means to me and how badly I would like to see it grow and evolve,” she writes. “It almost doesn’t feel like it should be up to me, because it has such a full life of its own, and is so connected to the lives of others.”
During Rookie’s seven years, Gevinson and a bevy of contributors carved out an expansive publication where high-minded comics about dismantling cultural imperialism and how-to guides on making zines (filed under the “Power” month) coexisted. Queries posed to the “Oh! You Pretty Things” beauty column were answered with meticulous photo tutorials and anecdotes, and the well-known series “Ask a Grown” featured the likes of the comedian Kumail Nanjiani and the hip-hop duo Run the Jewels reflecting on teen-agers’ submitted questions, often about that ever-present head scratcher, “Does this person even know I exist?”
To read Rookie was to be seen and to find a place where perhaps the most affirming comment section on the Internet empathized with conflicting feelings. Through personal stories, illustrations, photo essays, interviews, and experimental media, young people’s formative insights into identity and growing up were treated with validity and care instead of condescension and preachiness. Rookie cultivated a rare space where readers could examine what it means to be a person in their own small worlds and in the wider world around them.
In the public imagination and in popular culture, teen-agers are often coded as in between childhood and adulthood, fuelled mostly by hormones and curiosity. Young women and gender-nonconforming people especially have it tough, with a lineage of mixed messages and outdated understandings of how one should act and be and think. Few places before Rookie existed where young people in states of flux—with their environments and themselves—could openly assuage hurt, celebrate personal milestones, and read about how to apologize and set boundaries.
The readers of Rookie shared gorgeous collages and Ramadan zines, spoke about feeling excluded in scenes as people of color, interviewed protesters at marches protesting the Trump Administration’s immigration policy of separating families, and showcased their creative work, which they were sometimes making for the first time ever. “I first read this when it was published, and the idea of creating a zine took the hold of me. I’m from Brazil,” the user bitcherry wrote in response to the zine how-to. “I made one about feminism . . . later, I went to check on the copies I left in college and none of them were there . . . I asked the woman who works there if she saw what happened, and to my surprise she said lots of girls and even some boys were reading and liking them!”
It also evolved into an invaluable resource to unpack questions that don’t have ready or easy answers. The columnists Upasna Barath and Gabby Noone, in their video series “Upasna Asks” and “Noone Cares,” took on tangled scenarios—such as how to break up with a friend and what to do with one’s face while walking down the hall alone at school, respectively—by speaking with readers at eye level. “There’s this, like, Lean Cuisine in rhetoric that’s, like, ‘You can do anything, girl power, confidence, you got this!’ ” Noone said in an installment about dealing with imposter syndrome. “Which . . . partially true, but sometimes when we don’t think we know how to do something, there’s a chance that we actually don’t. And it’s just a matter of us asking for help.”
I grew up in a moment between analog and digital, taking homework to class on floppy disks and later experiencing high school through the exacting prism of Facebook. Rookie didn’t exist during my teen-age years, but that didn’t make it any less illuminating when I discovered it at twenty. These were guides on how to be a more thoughtful person, written by scores of thoughtful people all around the world! I’d never encountered a place online where people openly detailed the terror and thrill of crushes, and wrestled with tragedy as they were living through it, thorns and all. This was a far cry from the two-dimensional magazines that I pored over as a teen-ager, sitting in a corner on the floor at Barnes & Noble until they kicked me out.
As a writer, I came into the Rookie fold in 2013. Around then, the great former music editors Jessica Hopper and Anne T. Donahue asked me to interview artists including the late Cynthia Robinson, the wonderful trumpeter of Sly and the Family Stone. These were the first interviews that I’d done as a young journalist where my curiosity wasn’t quelled, and I didn’t feel at all pressured to make it a volley of call-and-responses; there, I could ask artists how it felt to first pick up an instrument and how exactly they refined their ideas. Early in my career, I’d been discouraged from using the first person, and was often surprised how the published writing was stripped clean of words that people use in everyday speech. At Rookie, the conversational tone was refreshing and radical to encounter. People expressed themselves through all caps, exclamations, italics, parentheticals, and words that are sometimes considered filler, such as “like.” I was able to know myself better through Rookie, and met many brilliant, caring people, both online and off; I will cherish this place forever.
In several months, Rookie’s site will no longer be live online. Yet its scrappiness and ethos has already found resonance beyond the digital world, through the incredible community of readers who have gone on to become artists, activists, and more aware of everyone else. Its legacy will be less as a Web site than as a brilliant, dear friend who was trying to figure it out at the same time. “I was a teenager living on a tiny island, and reading your articles and finding out that there were people out there who thought like me, who thought about so much more than me, really shaped who I became,” the user bedazzledbandannas wrote in a comment underneath Gevinson’s final letter. “I never made friends through Rookie; I never had any submissions posted; I never drew from it to launch my own artistic brand. But Rookie encouraged me to think more, to be more creative and introspective, and to consider things that were so much bigger than myself.”
Sourse: newyorker.com
