This interview originally appeared in La Fronde’s June 4 issue.
I was talking with some friends at a conference yesterday about how all of us, who are Millennials, are thankful that we didn't grow up in the age of social media. The privacy aspect of it is one thing (not to mention, teen-angst, Accutane-faced Stephanie would have been absolutely insufferable on Instagram), but a big part of what my friends and I bonded over as kids was watching the same shows together. Streaming ultimately killed that, making that communal experience all but void for the next generation of teens.
Paula James-Martinez felt that void acutely — as a fashion media veteran and as a mother of a tween she didn't want on TikTok. So last year she made a half-joking Threads post asking who wanted to make a teen magazine with her. The post ended up getting more than 12,000 likes and 3,000 people emailed her within two days. Cuqui, pronounced like cookie and means cute in Spanish, was practically willed into existence.
Paula, who has held roles at Refinery29, Purple, and Dazed, chatted with me for this week’s Maxed Out column about building the magazine — and shared her favorite corners of the internet.
So first off, the magazine and the website look great. Who designed it?
My incredible husband. He gave me his too-long last name, but he's also very useful.
It strikes a great balance of feeling nostalgic but modern. It really captures that ‘90s zine energy well.
That's a lot of the energy we're going for. I'm actually going to summer camp this summer with teen girls for two weeks to teach them zine-making — to truly understand what they want, as opposed to just approximating it. The zine energy is very strong with Cuqui.
You're a mother yourself and you see what your kids are reading and watching. What's out there for teens right now, and what were they telling you was missing?
The hardest part is this teen-tween age that we've collectively forgotten as a culture. We have a lot for young children — Disney shows, picture books — but young adults are struggling. Authors are struggling to get book deals, struggling to break through. So kids' culture becomes Roblox and TikTok and Minecraft, and their films become the Minecraft movie. Musically, if you ask a lot of kids which bands they like, they'll name their parents' music, because unless they have TikTok, there's no exposure to anything else. There's no mass culture anymore — it's been fragmented across the internet. They don't have MTV. They don't have the big websites we grew up with. They have influencers and games, but no real places that celebrate culture, art, or music. To me, that cultural void is what this was about.
So how did Cuqui actually start?
I actually started it by accident. I was on Threads, just yapping like we do on the internet — I hadn't really used it much before. I posted something like, "I'm the fashion director of Refinery29, I have a tween, I don't want her on TikTok, but there's no culture for her — bring back print for teens." And it went crazy. I put my email in there, and within two days 3,000 people had emailed me asking if we could make this. And I was like, I guess we have to now.
Were you taken aback by that response?
I think it's one of those things where, as someone who works in culture and follows culture, you feel the mood. I knew things were shifting — social isn't social the way it used to be, TV is shifting, media is shifting, everyone's nostalgic. But I don't think I realized quite how desperate parents, teachers, and older teens were for something to fill this void. That outpouring was surprising, because it's not like there are no magazines — there are still amazing style magazines, more niche publications for different facets of culture. But there was something specific about the mass nature of a teen magazine that really resonated with people.
A lot of people have ideas they throw around but never act on. What specifically compelled you to go from "people want this" to "I'm going to build it"?
I've always been that person. But I'm also lucky in that I actually know how to do it. I started at Dazed and Confused magazine when I was 19, and the world was still very much in print. The motto at Dazed at the time was "making it up as we go along.” I was brought up in indie magazine culture. I know what it's like to go to the printers, to stand something up when there's no money, to find talent. When I first started, they let me do the website because no one else wanted to. Within four years, everything had changed. And I feel it again now. I can't say it'll just be print, or just small independent media, but I think this is the moment — either I take this opportunity now or it doesn't happen. So I went for it. I was consulting at the time, and I thought I'd pick it up alongside that — and then it spiraled incredibly quickly into my very full-time, currently unpaid job.
But we're going to put good energy into this because it will be paid!
It will be paid. The more teenagers and young women I spoke to, the more I felt how important it was. I have so many emails from teen girls saying things like, "All the content that exists for me is just to sell me things about how bad I am, and there's nothing there that actually speaks to me as me, and there never has been in my lifetime." There are girls who wrote that they look at old movies of people with magazines and dream about what that would have been like. I didn't realize how profound it was for them until I truly started talking to them.
How did you figure out which topics and subjects to cover, especially for the first issue? From the preview on the site, it feels very grounded.
Some of it was following the classic teen girl playbook. We read a lot of old Sassy, a lot of Tiger Beat. And as much as we're older now, we were those girls — I thought about what I cared about at that age. Then I worked with editors like Brittney [McNamara] from Teen Vogue: what did teens care about? It came down to very basic things, like what happens if I get blood on the sheets when I get my period. And then talking directly to young women: what do you care about?
But the zine spirit — and by that I mean being a container for young voices — is central to everything. We're working with PBS young reporters, high school reporters in 300 high schools, and we're about to dive deeper into communities in the South and Atlanta. I want it to reflect what it really is to be a teen in this country — and not have this version of some fashion people in New York telling you what it is to be a teen in this country today. I grew up in a small town outside of London, and magazines opened up a world I never knew existed. That's what I want this to do: affirm for kids who don't have anyone to talk to that they're not alone — and that their questions aren’t weird and we can answer them in a stable way. How do we give kids who may never have had a track to journalism an opportunity to write? How do we give young photographers who have nothing but a TikTok account with no followers a place to thrive as artists? Alongside the editorial, we're building out a creative collective and an adult editorial board to support young people in training and becoming our voices in the magazine.
Covering the untold stories of women shaping media — the power, stakes, and players defining the industry. Free newsletter every Thursday.
What does it take to build something like this? What's the village involved?
I have the privilege of having been in magazines for a long time, so I know a lot of people who know how to do all the things — as friends, colleagues, people I trust and I can text shorthand. My old photo director is at Adobe now, but she said, "I can do this on the side — this is going to be so much fun." One of my advisors runs the biggest college media company in America. She happened to grow up in Asheville, which is the small town in North Carolina where I live, and she reached out to offer help. It's been an interesting combination of standing up both a business team and an editorial team — and the business side was really important to me. I was at Purple magazine for six years. I love Purple, I love Olivier [Zahm, co-founder of Purple], but it was true indie: four of us, and if we were having a party, we all carried the drinks ourselves, including the editor in chief. In today's media landscape, I really wanted to make something sustainable.
When we get to having a full staff, I don't want to be laying people off six months later because it didn't work out. So standing up the business foundation has been just as important as the editorial. My brand partnerships lead comes from a huge ad agency background in the UK and is also a tween mom. That's been a recurring thread — a lot of the women who've pushed this forward have been moms of girls this age, and they felt the need themselves. Team-wise, I probably have five or six people on the business side and five or six on the core editorial team. I am using a printer in the UK that I've known for years, and he's like, “it doesn't matter if you get the bleeds wrong, just send it to us early, we'll fix it for you, we'll make this happen.” There's just been a lot of people who've gone above and beyond what their traditional role would be in this and held my hand because they believe it's important.
You have the summer issue ready to go. What can we expect from it, and from Cuqui going forward?
When I first started, I said it had to be monthly. Everyone told me I was insane. But I was like, if we're not going online yet and we really want to bring it into teens' homes, we have to show up every month — otherwise we become old and distant. Then I realized I probably couldn't stand up a monthly print operation four months from inception. So I thought about it differently. Growing up, I used to get summer annuals of my favorite magazines — hardback, a celebration of the year. So we decided to start there.
The first thing coming out this summer is called The Universe. The front half is our editorial content, hardback. The back half is space for young people to document their own universe — prompts like "write a letter you'll never send" or "who's in your universe right now," along with quotes and space to reflect, so you can take it with you through the year. Ideally we'll bring one out every year. If you start in middle school, by the time you hit college, you might have six years of universes to look back on — and laugh at who you had a crush on.
The themes of this first one are reinvention, loneliness, and friendship — so core to who we are as adults, but especially as teenagers. We have everything from a piece by PBS young reporters at a school in Massachusetts where every child is an immigrant (they wrote about making friends, because from their perspective, "if we can make friends without even sharing a language, anyone can") to horoscopes, a "what kind of fairy are you" feature, and harder stories: what it is to be a foster youth, unpacking identity. Then with the monthly issues, it'll be a true teen magazine — quizzes, fashion pages, advice. We're working with sex educators and mental health therapists so there's a safe place for teens to ask awkward questions and get real answers from the right voices.
All the issues will be themed. The first monthly in January is our culture issue — literally asking readers, "What is your culture?" Someone told me subcultures can no longer exist because of the internet, since subcultures can only emerge in a vacuum. I don't think that's true. Even in this summer issue, there's a piece on how to build a cyberdeck — those tiny computers teenage girls are making. When I talked to them about it, they said it's a "fuck-the-system thing": there are all these guys trying to take over society and tell us how to think, so we're decentralizing our technology by building individual computers. Just like subcultures — there's the fun surface thing, and behind it there's something much more political and much deeper.
What does your daughter think of the magazine?
Her middle name is my husband's Cuban mom’s nickname — it's Spanish for "cute." When I told her we were calling the magazine Cuqui, she was like, "I don't know if you should use my middle name." But as it's evolved and started to feel real, she's come around to it. Now she tells me I need to run things by her so she can tell me if they're good. My biggest critic is my nine-year-old.
Last one — what's your average screen time right now, and any corners of the internet you'd recommend?
It's deeply ironic, because my screen time is exponential. Building a magazine means you're online all the time. My daughter has started telling me, "You're always on your phone," and I have to say, "I'm building something so you won't have to be on your phone — and right now I'm on my phone — I know, this is not better." It must be six or seven hours a day, because you're going to the depths of the internet following subcultures. I spend a lot of time on social media trying to find those subcultures — following threads down into something a random girl is doing that turns into a whole story. I found this amazing teenage girl in New York on Threads — her mom had shared it. She's a young Black woman who started painting herself different colors, purple or green, and just walking around New York as a kind of social experiment. I want to do a beauty story with her. That's the epitome of the cool young people we're trying to celebrate.
Otherwise, I read a lot of Substacks and industry things — brands, newsletters, all of it. Casey Lewis’ After School is one I'd recommend. I listen to a lot of podcasts. My husband wants me to stop listening to Pod Save America all the time, but for some reason it just makes me feel better — it's like the craziness filtered through someone else, so I don't have to face it directly.
Disclosure: Brittney McNamara, La Fronde's lead editor, is an advisor to Cuqui. She had no involvement in the reporting or editing of this piece.