ESSENTIAL READING: The Gossip Mill: Alloy, The Teen Entertainment Factory.

[Ryan Goble]

Did you ever wonder how they created the Sweet Valley High or Gossip Girl? We've all see the DVD extras about film and TV explaining their production but we're rarely given a glimpse in into the backstory of The Sisterhood of Traveling Pants or the effect of Ted Kennedy's death on the adolescent publishing world. If you work with young adult literature you'll want to put some time into this article. Part media literacy, part "behind the writing," I think you'll find this special feature to be pretty fascinating!

The article is presently only available to New Yorker subscribers. I pulled all the JPEGS below for folks to read here. If you drag the jpegs to your desktop they should be readable. For some reason the article is not appearing yet in the academic search databases, but I'll keep my eye open for it. This article is from the October 19, 2009 New Yorker.

An abstract of the piece can be found here.

[Marek Bennett]

Gosh, what a GREAT magazine... Often I can sit down with an issue and have SOMETHING totally catch my attenntion in almost EVERY article! I remember seeing that article, but I didn't get around to reading it before the next issue came along... I'll have to go back and find it in the 'zine basket.

[Ryan Goble]

As always with NY articles it takes a while - but it was totally interesting....

[Alan Teasley]

I agree with Ryan--this is a great article about the manufacturing of YA literature--particularly about literature written with an eye to the teenage girl market. I never realized that such a market-based, audience-tested, written-to-order approach was operating. Naively, I thought authors wrote the books then submitted them for publication, but this "Alloy" group does the same thing for YA lit that Hollywood studios do for mainstream movies. Fascinating.