For two decades, Teen Vogue was the rare space where young women—especially young women of color, saw themselves reflected in journalism. On Tuesday, that legacy was cut short when Condé Nast announced it was shuttering Teen Vogue after 22 years and folding it into Vogue.com. Conde Nast claimed that the move was “part of a broader push to expand the vogue ecosystem.”
Vogue’s head of editorial content, Chloe Malle will now oversee Teen Vogue while Editor-in-Chief, Versha Sharma will be leaving the company. While on the surface level, this may seem like yet another bump in the road of the media landscape at large which over the past decade has seen numerous publications shift online or go under all together, Losing this unique and important publication is a massive deal, especially for people of color. It is also indicative of a much larger, more sinister problem in the media today.
Teen Vogue was launched in January 2003 as a sister publication to Vogue and aimed specifically at teenage girls and young women. While its flagship publication Vogue focused on fashion and celebrity, Teen Vogue took a surprising and daring turn, expanding beyond fashion and the glitz and glamor and diving into culture and politics. It was revolutionary. Teen Vogue made politics feel like it belonged to us.
While other publications focused on quizzes and curating more superficial content for the teens to early twenties demographic, Teen Vogue evolved to take another approach. It aimed to inform young readers on political issues, history and their own bodies in ways that no other publication had before. In a culture where teenage girls are often portrayed as superficial in the media, Teen Vogue treated its audience like they were smart, curious readers looking to be informed about the world around them. Teen Vogue didn’t just teach us about politics, it taught us that our voices mattered in the conversation. For many young Latinas, that was the first time we saw stories that looked like ours told with dignity. And it was who was telling these stories that truly made Teen Vogue a special, once-in-a-lifetime publication.
Teen Vogue’s award winning status as a publication was a direct result of nurturing the voices of a diverse group of writers and platforming those from marginalized communities. In 2016, Elaine Welteroth became the then-youngest editor in Condé Nast’s history at just 29 and was the second African-American to hold the title of Editor-in-Chief at the media company. Teen Vogue made it a point to nurture writers of color, disabled writers and those from the LGBTQIA community, embracing their talents and their stories and allowing them the opportunity to share their voices in an industry that is not known for its diversity.
Even as the publication shifted from print editions to being solely online, its political section continued to be the most read section of the website. Which is why it outraged so many this week when it was announced that as a result of this merger with Vogue, Teen Vogue no longer had any political staffers. To cut the most popular and iconic feature of a publication isn’t just business, it’s intentional. And all of the readers who grew up reading Teen Vogue know that. For the magazine that got so many to pay attention to the world around them now has an entire generation of women who are politically astute and capable of reading between the lines and placing what is happening at Conde Nast into a larger context thanks in part to what they have learned over the years from Teen Vogue’s coverage.
This year, the media in this country has seen repeated, intentional efforts to silence the voices of journalists across the country and active efforts to remove people of color from newsrooms. CBS News has axed its Race and Culture Unit, with a former staffer accusing the company of race based layoffs. What is happening at Teen Vogue does not happen in a vacuum. It is just one example of the impacts of the current political climate. When you have a government that is actively villainizing brown and black people, condoning bigotry and allowing media conglomerates to merge unchecked, this is the intended result. For so long in this country, media has been made without the marginalized in mind. This isn’t accidental—it’s by design. American media wasn’t built for us. Outlets like Teen Vogue changed that.
The world today is actively trying to tell the marginalized that our voices do not matter and that we do not belong. How quickly we have gone from marching in the streets, outraged at the death of George Floyd and touting the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion to being laid off en masse, silenced, and removed from media and the platforms we and those who came before us fought so hard for us to get.
In a statement released on Instagram, Elaine Welteroth had this to say about Conde Nast’s decision,
“Losing Teen Vogue’s newsroom is more than just a business decision – it’s a cultural loss at a time when we need reliable journalism now more than ever.”
To her point, staffers at Conde Nast too felt like the decisions made regarding Teen Vogue were more than a business decision and sought to get answers. Approximately 20 editorial staffers attempted to discuss the layoffs with Conde Nast’s Chief People Officer, Stan Duncan. The result? Conde Nast fired four of the employees who participated in the gathering. The media is supposed to hold power accountable. So what happens when the media becomes the power that goes unchecked? When media conglomerates silence dissent within their own walls, they reveal just how deeply corporate power has overtaken journalistic integrity. The question isn’t just who holds the media accountable—but whether the media still belongs to the people at all.
Teen Vogue taught a generation of young women, especially young women of color, to question power and demand better. Even if Condé Nast silences its newsroom, the lessons it gave us won’t be folded away.
