Teen Vogue's Award-Winning Journalism Was Too Much Trouble for Condé Nast
The outlet just won recognition for speaking truth to power. Condé Nast responded by eliminating its entire politics staff and folding it into Vogue.
In September, the Roosevelt Institute announced it would honor Teen Vogue with its 2025 Freedom of Speech and Expression Award. The progressive think tank praised the outlet for understanding that “freedom is about both speaking truth to power and the capacity to build power,” highlighting coverage that connected issues like student debt, climate crisis, and fast food worker wages to the policy choices behind them.
Less than two months later, Condé Nast gutted the publication.
If you haven’t been paying attention to Teen Vogue over the past several years, this might not seem like a big deal. After all, wasn’t that just a fashion magazine for teenagers? But Teen Vogue had become something different. The outlet broke major stories, won awards for its political coverage, and became one of the few publications consistently speaking to young people about reproductive rights, LGBTQ issues, labor organizing, and state-level attacks on civil liberties. In March, they published an interview with Vivian Wilson, Elon Musk’s estranged trans daughter, that became one of Condé Nast’s top-performing stories of the year.
On Monday, Condé Nast announced that Teen Vogue would be “joining Vogue.com, a transition that’s part of a broader push to expand the Vogue ecosystem.” Several staffers were laid off — most of them BIPOC women or trans, including the publication’s politics editor and trans staffer who coordinated that Vivian Wilson cover story. Editor-in-chief Versha Sharma was pushed out. Culture editor Kaitlyn McNab posted that 70% of her team was gone. Teen Vogue now has zero writers or editors covering politics. After the layoffs, only one woman of color remains on the editorial staff.
But don’t worry! According to Condé Nast, Teen Vogue will “remain a distinct editorial property, with its own identity and mission.” The outlet will now focus on “career development and cultural leadership.”
The Roosevelt Institute released a statement responding to the news. “The decision by Condé Nast today to collapse this publication into Vogue and eliminate the politics reporting staff at Teen Vogue is evidence that corporate concentration eliminates innovative ideas and silences voices with less power.”
A “distinct editorial property”?
So what does a “distinct editorial property” look like after you’ve eliminated 70% of its staff?
According to Condé United and the NewsGuild of New York, what’s gone is “the political-cultural criticism of the fashion and culture industries by the Black women writers laid off today.” Gone are “the incisive and artful depictions of young people from the Asian and Latina women photographers laid off today.” Gone is the coverage of reproductive rights, campus organizing, state legislatures passing anti-LGBTQ bills, and labor movements. The work that actually made Teen Vogue distinct has been stripped away, and what remains will apparently focus on helping young people with their careers and teaching them about “cultural leadership” — whatever that means.
This wasn’t an accident. Vogue Business got the same treatment just last week, folded into Vogue.com in what Condé Nast is framing as part of creating a “unified reader experience across titles.” This is a strategy. Take publications that serve specific audiences with specific needs, kill off what makes them valuable, and absorb whatever’s left into the flagship brand.
The timing makes it worse. Teen Vogue spent years building expertise on the exact issues that are about to become even more urgent — attacks on reproductive rights, anti-trans legislation, threats to academic freedom, labor organizing among young workers. They did this work when it was difficult, when it meant fighting with their own corporate parent, when they could’ve just stuck to celebrity coverage and made everyone’s lives easier. And now, right when that coverage matters most, Condé Nast has decided it’s expendable.
And Condé Nast knew exactly what Teen Vogue was doing. They resourced that Vivian Wilson cover shoot in Tokyo. They promoted it when it became one of their top-performing stories of the year. They accepted the Roosevelt Institute award on the publication’s behalf. They just decided none of it was worth keeping.
What is being lost
Allegra Kirkland, Teen Vogue’s former politics director who’s now deputy editor at TPM, wrote about what was actually happening behind the scenes. By 2019, the outlet had been stripped down to no staff writers at all — just freelancers and columnists. Budgets kept getting slashed. When the team managed to bring in sponsor deals and partnerships, that money didn’t go back into Teen Vogue. It got funneled into Condé Nast’s general budget.
So Teen Vogue was being starved while it produced some of its best work.
Here’s a detail that tells you everything: In January 2021, right after the politics section had shattered traffic records covering COVID, the George Floyd protests, the election, and January 6th, Anna Wintour asked if they really still needed a politics section. Biden had won. Wasn’t that enough?
Then, just weeks before Trump’s second inauguration, Kirkland and a colleague got told that Wintour didn’t want to hear the word “politics” in their strategy meeting. Kirkland had to introduce herself as covering “social issues” instead.
The politics editor at an outlet that would go on to win a freedom of speech award couldn’t say “politics” in front of her boss. Wild stuff.
What Teen Vogue was actually doing: reporting on trans kids in red states, explaining how to access abortion care, covering ICE organizing, profiling celebrities in ways that actually connected with young readers, documenting environmental waste in fashion, tracking the crackdown on protest. This stuff got real traffic. It won awards. It served the audience.
Condé Nast was fine using Teen Vogue as proof they cared about diversity and young voices when it looked good. Then they threw it away the second it became inconvenient.
What’s next?
This is happening at exactly the wrong time, which is probably the point.
I’ve been writing for months about how major outlets are moving right, how they’re preemptively softening their coverage, how billionaire owners are making it clear what kind of journalism they’ll tolerate. The Washington Post gutted its opinion section. CBS News hired Bari Weiss. Newsrooms are seeing what a second Trump administration means for press freedom, and a lot of them are deciding the smart play is to not make waves.
Teen Vogue made waves. They covered trans rights when it was becoming politically toxic to do so. They explained how abortion restrictions actually worked. They took student organizing seriously. They gave young people bylines and treated them like they had something to say worth hearing. And Condé Nast looked at all of that and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.
There aren’t many outlets doing this kind of work, especially not for young readers. Most media aimed at teens is either vapid or condescending. Teen Vogue figured out how to cover politics and culture in ways that didn’t talk down to its audience, that trusted young people to care about policy and justice and the things that would actually shape their lives. Losing that matters, and not just because some journalists lost their jobs (though that matters too).
Where does a 19-year-old go now to read about what’s happening with reproductive rights in their state? Where does a college student find coverage of campus protests that doesn’t treat them like children having a tantrum? Where does a young trans person find reporting on anti-trans legislation that isn’t just scaremongering but actual journalism? These questions have answers, but they’re harder to find now.
And where do young journalists get their start? Kirkland talks about working with writers on their first professional bylines, about student correspondents who went on to jobs at other outlets. Entry-level positions barely exist anymore. Freelance budgets keep shrinking. Publications that will take a chance on someone without years of experience are disappearing. Teen Vogue was one of them, and now it’s gone.
The people who made these decisions will be fine. The Newhouse family will continue being billionaires. Nobody at the top faces consequences when they kill something valuable. They just move on to the next consolidation, the next round of layoffs, the next time they decide that good journalism isn’t worth the headache.
The staffers who got laid off, the young readers who lost a publication that spoke to them, the freelancers who just lost a market — they’re the ones who pay the price. And Condé Nast will keep saying Teen Vogue still exists as a “distinct editorial property” while everyone who made it distinct looks for new jobs.
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I haven’t been a teen for many decades, but I always appreciated the articles I found that were attributed to Teen Vogue, even now in my seventies. There were shining examples of excellent journalism and reading them was always a learning experience. So sad to see that their politics section has been gutted. I hope all of those fine journalists will find homes elsewhere, although too many publishers have become gutless wonders under this regime. So sad to read about what has transpired.
The methodical destruction of Teen Vogue is yet another atrocity in the relentlessly atrocious, definitively ecogenocidal history of capitalism. Two suggested terms for what was done to destroy this vital publication: "Trumpification," as in reduction to glitz-clad emptiness; and "MAGATizing," as in reducing to the lowest possible common denominator of mentality.