The Media Column: Pin-ups and make-up – don't teenage girls deserve better?

Annie's appearance moved me closer to tears than laughter, but I suppressed both. The fishnet tights, micro-skirt and combat boots looked ludicrous on her young teenager's body. The soles were broader than her waist, giving the impression of one of those anatomically distorted dolls that are designed to stand up even when bent in half. In that part of Glasgow late on a Saturday night, she was in danger of being mistaken for someone less fortunate than a bright schoolgirl waiting for a lift home from a friend's disco. The badge declaring, "Looking for Love, Will settle for Sex," did not help.

Annie is not her real name, but she is a friend of my daughter. So, when the delivery run was complete, I asked Miss Luckhurst, who is nearly 13, why such a bright creature had appeared in public in the guise of one of the cartoon characters the Powerpuff Girls, with eyeliner as heavy as Victorian cornices. Do you have teenage children? Fine; we can skip my daughter's 30-minute rant about the photographs of me, at the same age, in bondage trousers and a "Mummy, What's a Sex Pistol?" badge.

The answer had something to do with ideas gleaned from magazines. Phoebe acknowledged that the style looked better on the model than it did on Annie. Then she declared that the magazines were "mostly crap" anyway.

Last year, I was not allowed to visit the newsagent without collecting the latest issues of IPC's Shout and its stablemate Mizz. Recently, NatMags' junior version of Cosmopolitan, Cosmo Girl, has appeared whenever there is enough money left after the essential mobile-phone top-up card. The February "Snogging Issue", complete with "sexy sealed section" including "pecstatic" shots of "nearly nude dudes" and advice on how to "bag that lad", is by her bed. But she is not massively impressed. Phoebe is currently absorbed by Jay McInerney's Story of My Life. His tales of New York life may be inappropriate for someone just about to enter her teens, but at least they provoke thought. The magazines, I am told, do not.

The latest ABC figures for the teen-magazine market suggest that my domestic observations may not be entirely singular. Cosmo Girl's sales have declined by almost a fifth in the six months since June 2002. Sugar, Hachette Filipacchi's market leader, has shed 17 per cent of its readers over the past year. Shout is down by exactly the same percentage, and Mizz has lost 11 per cent of its readers. There is some evidence of slightly improved sales for celebrity, as opposed to lifestyle, titles. TV Hits is selling 7 per cent more than a year ago. Top of the Pops magazine is up 4 per cent, and Emap's new launch, Sneak, has started with a sale of 86,535.

Some observations. My, admittedly unscientific, panel of teenage girls assembled in the Luckhurst kitchen last week to paint a huge anti-war banner with acrylic paints borrowed from the school art department. I won't pretend that any of them had read The Economist or logged on to the International Crisis Group website, but they were all thirsty for information on more substantial issues than make-up, kissing and bedroom makeovers. A question arose. Are the teen magazines guilty of the allegedly impossible – ie, are they underestimating the sophistication of their market?

I have long puzzled over the absence of a lifestyle-and-advice magazine for young teenage boys. Granted, they obsess about PlayStations and football, but is it not possible that, despite denying it to focus groups, some of them, away from the weight of peer-group pressure, actually have a thirst for knowledge about the world around them? If so, is there not a potential niche for a magazine designed to be read by both sexes and offering an element of real news as well as lifestyle tips and celebrity gossip?

The panels against which magazine launches are tested would be unlikely to pick it up if there were. It is the sort of product that parents would buy for their children, not children for themselves. It could have the sort of appeal that The Funday Times adds to The Sunday Times, the public-service attraction of tailored news for children on television and readings from children's literature on BBC radio. I would buy it. Phoebe's friends say they would read it. Annie did not say so, but I suspect that carefully judged arguments about crisis, war and terror would appeal just as much as stories on the latest fashions. There is no reason a magazine could not include both. None of the existing titles even tries.