"Grownups in Hippieland": Seeing the Counterculture through Eye and Cheetah Magazines

abstract: As youth culture, the counterculture, and protest against racial discrimination and the Vietnam War grew in the 1960s, mass-circulation magazines such as Time, Life , and Newsweek published stories about the young generation, but many young Americans scoffed at the mainstream media's reporting on their generation, and a vibrant underground press emerged in many cities and college towns. Some large publishing companies spied a lucrative market in the baby boom generation and believed that a glossy magazine for readers in their late teens and twenties could attract subscribers and advertisers. A group of investors created Cheetah in 1967, and the Hearst Corporation launched Eye the following year. Both magazines were short-lived: Cheetah published only eight monthly issues, and Eye only fifteen. Why did Cheetah and Eye fail? Neither magazine discovered the right formula for a glossy but hip magazine for the young generation. Both magazines published some excellent writing and adopted visual and literary styles from the counterculture and the underground press. But they also struggled to appeal to a broad readership and to advertisers. Ultimately, Cheetah and Eye were too conventional for radicals and hippies and too countercultural for mainstream readers, yet they contributed to the countercultural and political ferment of the 1960s, which changed American culture in ways that endured long after the Summer of Love and Woodstock.