SMS craze gets own magazine

By Karl Quinn
February 13, 2005

Australian publisher Pacific Magazines has just launched what it claims is the world's first magazine devoted to the world of text messaging.

Text Central debuted as an eight-page, small-format mag-within-a-mag inside this month's issue of TV Hits. Already there are plans to double its size for the second issue. Parents of phone-wielding teens, you have been warned.

Yes, the news is shocking, but just imagine how much worse it could have been if the whole magazine had been written in txt. In case you can't imagine, that last sentence would have read like this: "ys, D nws S shocking, bt jst imagiN hw mch worse it c%d av bn f D hol mag had bn ritN n txt" (translation courtesy of Some thought was given to that approach, but ultimately the txt was restricted to the SMS letters pages.

So is this magazine, which is pitched at readers aged between 10 and 17, just an evil ploy to spur yet more teenagers to enter the mobile phone market? According to editor Shannon Shipley, 32, absolutely not.

"We're late on the scene, if anything, " he says. "We're reflecting the trend rather than creating it."

According to Roy Morgan research commissioned by Pacific, 687,000 14 to 17-year-old Australians have a mobile phone and 327,000 intend to buy one in the next year. That's a potential market that TV Hits, which sells about 45,000 copies a month, would dearly love to tap.

But if Text Central is boldly going where no magazine has gone before, its content hardly breaks new ground. There's a celebrity interview (Joel Turner in issue one), with the focus on mobile phone use (Q: Who do you call the most? A: Pizza Hut); a selection of phone news (Siemens has just released a denim and diamante phone case); a section called Hollywood Hotline, full of snippets that vaguely link celebrities to phones ("Britney recently had all camera phones confiscated from a party"); and a double-page spread in which a celebrity offers advice to readers ("whnver i talk 2 guys my frnds tease me & say I'm a flirt... how cn I stop dem bitchin bout me?").

Despite the lightweight nature of the material, Mr Shipley believes the magazine has a serious role to play.

"I have a responsibility as an editor to help people deal with their personal entertainment units," he says (and he's referring to their phones, in case you were wondering). "As the magazine develops, we'll be running stories about how to deal with a ridiculous bill, how to keep your bills down, that sort of thing."

Quite how articles about the hidden traps of mobile phone usage will wash with the magazine's most likely advertisers - phone manufacturers and service providers - remains to be seen, since issue one is virtually ad free. But Mr Shipley is convinced that one thing at least is certain: the link between teens and phones is only going to become stronger.

"Mobiles are so much more to kids than just phones," he says. "They're an extension of the rites of passage of youth... And that's what this magazine reflects."

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