The kazoo is an instrument of noise. It’s fun to play and anyone can do it.
Alumna Erin Bried wants to show young girls everywhere that the world can be the same way. That’s why she named her new magazine for young girls Kazoo. http://kazoomagazine.com
On a cold day in February, Bried and her daughter Ellie searched their local Barnes & Noble in Brooklyn for a magazine they could read together. All of the periodicals for young girls looked the same. They were pink, flowery and featured topics on hair, make-up, dolls and princesses.
Bried, who earned her advertising degree from the College of Communications in 1996, and her daughter weren’t having it.
“A magazine about finding the right bathing suit is not what I want for my 5-year-old daughter,” Bried said. “We left the store empty handed, and I kept thinking to myself, ‘Somebody should do something about this’. Then, I realized that somebody should be me.”
Bried has almost 18 years of experience in the magazine industry. She has written more than 140 cover stories on a range of topics and people, and last fall, she left her position as editor at Condé Nast to work on a novel.
Bried then hatched the idea for Kazoo, a quarterly magazine designed to ignite a spirit of fun, imagination and critical-thinking in girls 5 to 10 years old. Soon, it would receive glowing reviews from many big names, including author Neil Gaiman, Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Parents and the Huffington Post -- all before the first issue was sent to print.
“I’m inspired by strong women who use their platforms to affect change,” Bried said. “[Journalist and long-distance swimmer] Diana Nyad, who I just interviewed for Kazoo’s first issue, urged our readers to risk failure rather than to not try at all. That is such a valuable message for girls to hear, and I don’t think they hear it enough.”
She said what celebrities are wearing or how to drop 10 pounds will never be the focus of Kazoo. Instead, the magazine will introduce its young readers to trailblazing women, and share their stories.
Bried is recruiting all kinds of women to contribute to each issue in their own unique ways. The summer 2016 issue features a comedian, graphic novelist, chemist, swimmer, chef, marine biologist and many more women at the tops of their fields. Each article includes a cartoon drawing of the profiled woman when she was a little girl -- a nice touch to show readers that these inspiring female heroes were once little girls, too.
Inside the magazine, headlines are peppered with action verbs: search, look, draw, catch, build, make waves. Like a coloring book on steroids, Kazoo’s pages are chock-full of activities that get girls moving, thinking and making noise. Readers are encouraged to build a boat, find constellations and even make “seed bombs,” which are balls of seeds that can turn an empty dirt lot into a wildflower garden.
“We want to show them scientific experiments, travel and sports,” Bried said. “We want to make their experience in the world richer.”
She added that keeping the door open to as many opportunities as possible is vital for girls. And although the inspiration to start Kazoo began in a bookstore in Brooklyn, the motivation to make it happen accelerated after Bried read some troubling statistics.
According to the Women Sports Foundation, by age 14, girls are twice as likely to quit playing sports as boys the same age. The Girl Scout Research Institute reported that 74 percent of girls are interested in engineering fields, but only 11 percent of practicing engineers are women. Also, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 21 percent of chefs and head cooks are women.
The numbers kept piling up and Bried, who also has a younger daughter Bea, did not want her children to drop their interests because of societal pressures and norms. It turns out she wasn’t alone.
“The response has been incredible,” she said. “It’s amazing how hungry people are for content for their daughters. I think it’s the fact that this has never been done before and we give their kids something fun and smart to read. It makes perfect sense.”
Within 30 days, Kazoo raised $171,215 from more than 3,000 backers on Kickstarter. The project is the most successful journalism campaign in the online crowd-funding company’s history. Nearly 1,000 of the donations came from first-time backers, which means they joined Kickstarter specifically to support the cause.
The expectations remain high. Bried says she holds a “deep personal responsibility” to exceed and live up to all of them, not only for her contributors, backers and readers, but for her daughters Ellie and Bea too.
“Ellie has been my tiny editor,” Bried said proudly. “She will look over the pages and check out the sketches. Are things too hard? Too easy? I want to include things that girls her age have never seen before, and she’ll let me know.”
With an initial print of 7,000 copies, girls all over the country will get to see something on magazine racks -- including the one in the Brooklyn Barnes & Noble -- that they have never seen before. They will see a magazine that will take them to new places, show them news things and, hopefully, encourage them to make some noise.