

Jeremy Zilar is the Content Strategist and Blog Specialist at The New York Times where he has overseen the launch of over 200+ blogs and real-time news publishing.
Over the last 30 days, I have been very fortunate to play a part in the realization of a remarkable project by the 15-year-old style blogger Tavi Gevinson.
The new project, titled ‘ROOKIE,’ is imagined as a hybrid between a magazine and a blog and will publish 3 times a day — once after school, once at dinner time, and once before bed. Tavi explains it like this:
Rookie is not your guide to being a Teen. It is not a pamphlet on How to Be a Young Woman. (If it were, it would be published by American Girl and your aunt would’ve given it to you in the fifth grade.) It is, quite simply, a bunch of writing and art we like and believe in. While there’s always danger in generalizing a whole group of people, I do think some experiences are somewhat universal to being a teenager, specifically a female one. Rookie is a place to make the best of the beautiful pain and cringe-worthy awkwardness of being an adolescent girl. When it becomes harder to appreciate these things, we also have good plain fun and visual pleasure. When you’re sick of having to be happy all the time, we have lots of eye-rolling rants, too.
Working with Tavi has been really amazing. She is more put together than most editors twice her age. She has an amazing ability to think multiple steps out in a project and play out various editorial, production, and communication scenarios. She knows the nuances that come with every mode of communication. And most importantly, she knows how to say ‘No’ with grace and re-direct an idea towards her vision. These qualities are made all the more exceptional by the fact that she is only 15. Most people three times her age in her industry have yet to grasp all of these talents in as genuine a way as she has.
Tavi’s vision for the site and what it could become drove many characters to take part in making Rookie a reality, in under 30 days.
Comments can be left over at Rookie on one of the many articles that just went up. Comments on this post in particular are being taken on Google+.