Amy Schroeder was a 19-year-old women’s studies major at Michigan State when she created Venus in 1995. Feminism was the point of her education, and it was the point of her fanzine. “Though I was surrounded by conservatism, I started reading about the feminist movement and Gloria Steinem while I was in high school,” she told me the other day in an e-mail, “and it excited me just as much as the rock that was popular in the early to mid-90s.
“If we kept doing the same things and covering the same people year after year, we would have folded in the early 2000s. Many of the bands we used to cover have broken up. It’s similar with any publication—if Rolling Stone had continued to focus on 1960s Revolution Rock, it wouldn’t exist today.”
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After college, Schroeder published Venus out of New York and San Francisco, where other journalism jobs paid the rent. It wasn’t until 2003, after she’d moved to Chicago, that she could work on Venus full-time. In 2006 she sold Venus to Anne Brindle and Marci Sepulveda, copublishers of Chicago Agent, a real estate trade magazine, but she stayed on as editor until September 2008. She told me she sees herself as the person “who gets things going,” and that she was reaching the upper limit of her magazine’s 18-to-34 demographic, she was now teaching at Columbia College, and she’d decided to move to New York. (She’s there now, as a full-time writer and editor for the Girl Scouts who’s also helping HarperCollins create a Web site to attract a community of aspiring teen writers.)
Beardsley believes that there are a lot more women happy to raise their hand to that description than Venus has ever reached, and she hopes the allure of her new magazine’s “incredible ability to spot trends and spot talent” will draw them in.
“She wants to make it more broad-based,” the loyalist continued. “If she wants to make it an Oprah magazine for hipster ladies, maybe all power to her.” The editor Beardsley eventually hired is Jill Russell, who’d been an associate editor of Martha Stewart’s Body + Soul magazine in New York. Schroeder has talked to her and says “she seems great.”
Would it be accurate, I asked, to say that Venus still needs to exist, but not necessarily as the old Venus?
