Atoosa.com Launches to Legions of Web Fans

Atoosa Rubenstein shook up the publishing world when she announced that she was leaving the helm of Seventeen to focus on building her web presence. And build her web site she did: Atoosa's MySpace page reflects her having close to 44,000 friends as of this printing.

Now Atoosa has launched Atoosa.com - a new website from the woman who boldly declares that the next Oprah will not come to life via television, but through the internet - with followers gleaned in the social-networking type of world that exists today.

Atoosa.com is the first step in Atoosa Rubenstein's multimedia empire, a digital kingdom that will exist around a person - Atoosa - and her audience of mostly young women from 13 to 30 who leave her fawning and gushing comments on her blog.

"I saw what was coming," Atoosa told BusinessWeek, referring to the recognition that newspapers and print magazines are falling away in droves as young readers prefer to gather their news, gossip and fashion trends via the net.

"What I want to do is gather my tribe," Atoosa continued, "the ones reading Seventeen, and the ones who were, and grew out of it."

The tribe is indeed starting to gather, as a quick Google blog search on the term Atoosa.com is beginning to attest. But Atoosa.com is just the beginning for this 35-year-old wunderkind who hails from Tehran, Iran, and came to the United States feeling like an outsider, unable to speak a word of English

The Atoosa.com founder found her niche when she entered the magazine world and moved up the ranks from fashion assistant at Cosmopolitan in 1993, eventually becoming a senior fashion editor in 1998.

Hearst Magazines President Cathleen Black then tapped into Atoosa's brain and asked Rubenstein to come up with a concept for a new girl's glossy. Only a couple of days later Atoosa presented the idea for CosmoGirl!

"You thought, she had to do it,'" Cathie Black said about her first meeting wherein Atoosa described CosmoGirl! "It was seeping out of her pores."