Net gets a new look

Posted by admin on Feb 3, 2009 in Community | 0 comments

Brittany Law, a first year Communications major, is founder and editor-in-chief of the online-based Style Republic magazine. She’s had the chance to interview the likes of Gene Simmons, Michael Buble, The Pussycat Dolls and Christina Aguilera. Her success in life has started young, and at 18 she’s owned her own magazine for a year now.

Though she is currently successful, Brittany’s road to success got off to a bumpy start. Before Brittany started her own magazine, she interviewed to write for another. The editor liked her articles, but thought that she had plagiarized them: “It just looks like something a 40-year-old man could write,” he responded to her attempts. After confirming that Brittany had, in fact, written the articles, the magazine offered her the job. “I was just so turned off by the whole experience,” she said. Afterwards, she was so mad about the situation that she thought, “I’ll just start my own magazine.”

One of the keys to her success was her skill with web design. “I have been doing website design since I was around 10, so I’m pretty familiar with computers,” she said.

“The website would look really good, so [potential interviewees] would assume that the company was bigger than it was,” she said. “They’d say, ‘Yes, we definitely want to do interviews for you.’”

Because Brittany wanted to be taken seriously, she kept her age and the size of her company quiet. “The biggest thing about doing interviews is that people have to think that you are legitimate,” she said. “I would talk to them on the phone, I would talk to them via email, but they never knew my age and they never knew that I was the only person behind the company.”

But when Brittany would show up to interviews, the celebrities would notice her age. “I’d show up at some of the interviews and the celebrities would be like ‘Oh my gosh, how old are you?’” Brittany said. She tried to hide age by saying, “Oh, you don’t want to know how old I am,” but they would persist. “I’d tell them I was 18 and they’d say ‘Whoa! And that was your company on the website?’”

Brittany believes that everyone can achieve his or her own dreams. “Don’t think that you can’t just because you don’t have a degree, or your parents or teachers say that you can’t,” she said. “Everybody is capable.”

Visit Brittany’s magazine at: stylerepublic.com