My hat goes off to my coworkers at my past magazine jobs, who truly seemed like miracle workers at times. They could fashion the most unsavory celebrity interview into a cover story where you wouldn’t catch any whiff of drama behind the scenes. It’s a skill Lauren Brown West-Rosenthal had to flex during her time as CosmoGirl’s entertainment editor at the height of the teen pop phase of the early aughts. For this week's La Fronde cover story, Lauren talked to me about some of her wildest interviews at CosmoGirl and what they reveal about what these (mostly) teenage girls were going through behind the scenes.

Plus, some notable Substack writers say their paid subscribers have fallen off a cliff — and more media intel in Seen and Heard. And we’ve got another hot media take from one of our La Fronde readers to discuss in today’s I Said What I Said.

xoxo,

Stephanie

Lauren Brown West-Rosenthal was in the room when the teen pop era of the early aughts was at its peak, interviewing young stars who were reckoning with fame before their frontal lobes had caught up. As an editor at CosmoGirl, she talked to the biggest stars of the time — Avril Lavigne, the Olsen twins, Hilary Duff, to name just a few — and kept most of the transcripts and tapes from all those years ago which she's now revisiting on her Substack, The Teen Mag Time Machine.

Read back now, they're a record of how brutal the media cycle could be toward young women — and also how messy, funny and unscripted those conversations actually were before every celebrity interview came pre-approved. Lauren talked to me about the parts of those conversations that had to be left on the cutting room floor, and what those stars were going through that they didn't want the public to know.