MediaFile

Magazines goooood, social networking sites baaaaad.

That appears to be one of the messages delivered by Hearst, publisher of CosmoGirl! and Seventeen magazines. The magazines surveyed 1,000  teenagers, and concluded for the most part that their printed products are more essential for teenaged girls than those unreliable social networking Web sites. (Teenaged girls use print magazines to help them shop, as opposed to Web sites; they trust magazines more than other sources; and more of what you might expect a magazine publisher to say.)

We’re passing over that love letter to advertisers and focusing on something deeper in the press release: apparently their own Web sites are safer for teenagers than social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

As the release says:

The results of the survey share insight into teen media usage patterns to explain how and why young women use online versus print media. While 86% of teens went online daily, they spent a fourth of their time visiting social networking websites. An overwhelming 81% of teens felt more confident in the information they received from a magazine editor than from a user-generated source. In addition, the survey found that teens feel safer on magazine sites: over 40% admitted to having a bad experience interacting on a social networking site.

And yet — Facebook and MySpace traffic keeps rising.