Covering international elections in American political terms

KILL LIST

In July, Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil and a far-right firebrand, threatened to cancel the nation’s elections. American outlets compared the situation to Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud in the United States. But in Brazil, a country with a recent history of dictatorship and a leader whose cronies imprisoned his political rival, the threat to democracy is far more acute. work anymore. I think the future of political journalism is centered around people. And people are not objective. Everyone has biases; everyone has their own perspectives on how things work. It’s our job as political journalists to make sure that those perspectives are heard and accurately told and accurately contextualized.

SEDDIQ As journalists, we still do a good job, for the most part, of trying to remain objective. At the end of each story, I make sure every single word I’ve written, I can fully stand by it as accurate and fair and truthful. I would say that, to be objective—if I am fully comfortable with what I ran, then I think that I’ve achieved objectivity in that piece.

MCGRAW There is a greater chumminess between the press corps and a Democratic White House, at least from what I’ve seen with Biden so far. A lot of these people have been in DC for a long time. They know a lot of the reporters. They know how it all operates.

I think it’s really important to just acknowledge both sides of the argument, and don’t let your own personal passions get in the way of a story. I think you see that play out far too often, where people let that get in the way of just telling the story and doing their job. It’s not about you. It’s not about what you think, or what you think the right answer is. It’s about telling the news. When you see people really editorialize stuff, it’s frustrating, because you’re alienating a lot of readers that way. They’re looking at it and they’re like, “This comes across like an opinion column.”

MERCADO I am a woman of color. And I know that I bring a certain perspective and value to the team. I think about ways that we can cover things in relation to our local communities that maybe my other colleagues won’t necessarily think of. And I think that now we’re seeing more of those conversations take place in newsrooms, and seeing the different perspectives that myself or other people of color on our team bring, and how we can incorporate that into our reporting, objectively.

I take objectivity very seriously, especially with my sources. I have a lot of sources in the community of color; I have a lot of sources in BLM. I get questions: “What do you think about this?” or “What do you think about that?” And it’s not my job to tell people how I think about things. It’s my job to tell people how it’s affecting you, or what you think about it. It’s my job to make sure that I don’t cross that line, so that I can continue to do reporting that people can trust in and see as valuable.

CLÓ I try to get a variety of opinions. I hate just having one side, because I think that the same way the press serves as a vehicle for public officials to communicate with the public, putting the public’s voice there is also a way of sharing the public’s thoughts with the people who are in charge or making decisions, or legislating. What I sometimes take issue with—just gathering opinions to have different sides—is that a lot of opinions are just sharing hate. I really believe in maximizing truth and minimizing harm. Some thoughts are just so hateful, so why would I give that person a voice?

Especially after all the protests that followed George Floyd in Minnesota—I think a lot of outlets started looking at how we cover race, and started having a more open mind towards calling out racists. Even if you look at the AP style change of capitalizing Black, which I think was important to do, I think journalists in general right now are growing. They are realizing that the way they cover the issues matters, and calling out something for being racist does not necessarily mean a lack of objectivity.

When it comes to political journalism, I think, generally speaking, the public—and maybe that’s on journalists—the public has a hard time understanding what’s commentary and what’s news. I think sometimes journalists make those lines blurry, and I think that the public gets confused: Is this an article, or is this an opinion piece? I think there is a need for journalists to be more transparent on what’s opinion, what’s commentary, and what’s news.

MULLINGS Journalism is built on—you know, it’s still very, um, white. I like that we’re having a new conversation about objectivity in the wake of, I don’t know, taking Black journalists seriously and taking journalists of color seriously when it comes to covering really traumatic news and traumatic stuff going on in politics.

Objectivity for me is a pair of glasses that I put on so that I can look at my article and say, you know, “Is this going to serve the community properly? Do they have all the information they need to make a subsequent decision off of this article?” Whether they will or not, that’s how I’m thinking about every article. My editor says: look at every fact and say, “How do I know this?” You can challenge yourself, too; it’s like an inner factcheck kind of thing.

So for people to say all reporters are objective and a reporter has to be objective—I don’t think that makes a lot of sense. Because naturally you’re going to have bias. When a Black man dies at the hands of police, that’s going to upset me because I have two Black brothers who are, you know, in their late twenties, and it could just as easily have been them. When a woman is assaulted I feel horrible about it, and I feel personally like something should be done about it, because it could just as easily have been me.

Onward

SULLIVAN The hardest part of the Trump administration was, honestly, keeping up with what was happening. News was breaking so fast. We were often working on these long investigations, and trying to get somewhere with an investigative piece, or just a longer enterprise piece—it was so hard to focus on one story for even a couple of weeks or days. Explosions were happening everywhere. By the time you’ve finished figuring out what was going on with one story, five stories had already passed you by and people were moved on to something else.

When Biden first took office, I was like, “Wow, everything’s so calm. What’s happening in the news?” And I realized that, well, a lot is happening, but crazy stuff doesn’t happen. We’re not about to start a war with Iran every single day. There are really important accountability and corruption stories to do that aren’t about porn stars that we can now dig into. Maybe they take longer to work on, and maybe aren’t as flashy or exciting, and not as many people are gonna read about them, but they’re still really important. MCGRAW The Trump White House leaked like crazy. You could always get somebody to talk trash or, you know, dish on another adviser or another aide in the White House. They were eager to do things like that. But Biden’s team, it’s more buttoned up. They’re very careful with what they say to the press. You could argue in a lot of ways they’ve been too careful. Biden has not interacted with the press as much as he should.

Political journalism, I still think, serves a really important function and role. I don’t think it’s broken, per se, but I think there are some serious cracks in it. I think it just goes back to trying to play it straight. Every time somebody doesn’t, it ends up alienating certain people.

“For people to say all reporters are objective and a reporter has to be objective— I don’t think that makes a lot of sense. Because naturally you’re going to have bias.”

NILSEN After January 6, after covid, after just the whole Trump era—I think that that has changed politics forever. You can just look at the Republican Party, at the people that are successful—Marjorie Taylor Greene and people that are saying wild stuff—raising a ton of money and getting a lot of press coverage. I don’t think there’s a “normal” to go back to.

The Trump era showed that there are very, very real consequences to all this stuff. He actively fomented an insurrection and spouted a lie that the election results were false and tried to overturn them. I do feel, at least at the beginning, Trump was just a sideshow and was not taken seriously. I do think that the industry is getting a little bit more cognizant.

SEDDIQ With the 2020 election, headlines were: “Trump falsely claims that the 2020 election was rigged.” I would say before Trump, I don’t think you would see that sort of forceful language in headlines; instead you might see somebody writing what Trump said, and then an expert would push back against that statement, or whatever. But now it’s just the journalists sort of telling the reader directly: this is false. I think that’s a hard thing to navigate. Is it more important for journalists to tell the readers themselves, or is it still more reliable to hear it from a health expert or an election expert?

I just want to emphasize, you know, what may be important to us as political journalists may not be important to the rest of the country— and so we have to let that be what’s guiding us.

RELMAN I don’t really know what it means to “go back to normal” at all, because I wasn’t a reporter on an administration before Trump. And I feel like things have definitely changed under Biden. But I don’t know how to define normal. I think what we need is a lot more certainty and a lot more truth coming from government.

SAMUELS I’m not really sure what normalcy entails. But there are a lot of things that can improve. And I would like to see those things improve before we go back to a “normal.” Moving forward, I’d love to see less scoop journalism. I’d love to see more politics reporters covering policy, and I’d love to see more diversity in this field. And I think if that’s not part of the new normal, then that’s a detriment to this industry.

CLÓ Saying that things “aren’t normal” has always been the norm. I don’t think journalism changed after President Trump was elected. Because he managed to have a lot of firsts, it felt that way, but I think that overall, CNN has always focused on the president, and so has Fox News. National outlets have always felt focused a lot on the president, and when the president is responsible for a lot of firsttime events, or firsttime attitudes, or whatever it may be, that’s news. It will always be news.

In Scottsdale, I don’t think there has been a press conference since I started. But sometimes what I see in a lot of news markets is that there are a lot of press briefings where the reporter doesn’t learn anything from it. So I think that there are valuable press releases, there are valuable press conferences, but something new has to come out of

it. The reporter has to learn something from it; otherwise it’s just a waste of everyone’s time. I also think that all reporting should go beyond the scope of press releases and press briefings. There’s always a bigger story to be told than just the ones that officials want you to tell.

MULLINGS Political journalism does bother me. A lot of times we’re just covering, like, the mayor said a thing that made somebody mad, or the attorney general said a thing that made somebody mad. And it’s like, jeez, they’re just people—they are very regular people, and they have families, and they have their own shortcomings and their own biases. And to me—even though, being a resident of a place, you do look up to them—they’re really not that different from us. And so it does feel a little silly and gossipy sometimes.

FOWLER I think a lot of times political reporters act like goldfish—like, intelligent goldfish—where they’ll be really, really good at covering that particular story, and that particular event in that particular context, and then forget it ever happened when the next thing comes along. So I think good political journalism is a constantly evolving story. To me, good political journalism is acknowledging that nothing ever happens in a vacuum and connecting the contextual threads.

It’s up to you as the reporter to make sure that people can listen to your piece and read the digital story and come away knowing everything that they need to know about not only what happened, but the why. I think, too, one of the things that is often missing from political journalism is the why. I think the fact that I’m twentyseven and a giant moron when it comes to how most things have worked is an advantage. Because I, in many ways, don’t have expectations about how something is supposed to go or how something is supposed to work. And so basically I get to be the conduit for all the dumb questions people might have about how different parts of government work, or what different bills or policies or things mean. And so we kind of get to go on this journey together. cjr

Teen Vogue’s complicated political transformation

WINTOUR LAND

OK, Seriously

AUTHOR Clio Chang

ILLUSTRATOR Marysia Machulska I n March, Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue and global content adviser at Condé Nast, selected Alexi McCammond, a twenty-seven-year-old political reporter for Axios, the Beltway-insider publication known for covering the news in bullet points, to run Teen Vogue. The hire was controversial; soon after it was announced, readers began circulating antiAsian and homophobic tweets that McCammond had posted when she was seventeen. It was also a surprise to the magazine’s staff, who suddenly found themselves fielding online blowback to McCammond. Many were frustrated that they had not been given a heads-up about her appointment, and found McCammond—who had no magazine experience and was dating someone from the Joe Biden administration—a confusing pick to lead Teen Vogue, which, alongside celebrityfashion photography, runs rabble-rousing articles claiming that Biden and the Democrats represent a “ruling class.” Lindsay Peoples Wagner, the outgoing editor, had not included McCammond among her list of potential successors, and she cautioned Condé Nast that the tweets might pose a problem. Soon, a rumor went around, one that aimed to explain how Wintour had arrived at McCammond in the first place: perhaps, it was suggested, she’d sought recommendations from Biden. It may come as little surprise that no one was able to confirm whether the gossip was true. (Wintour declined to comment. A Condé Nast spokesperson said, “It was a rumor that ran around last spring and

is totally false.”) But like all good rumors, it was extraordinary only in its banality; the fact that it was believable was telling. Wintour— who has hosted fundraisers for Biden and Barack Obama, and whose daughter-in-law worked for the Biden campaign—might have had the access and, conceivably, the inclination to turn to Biden for advice on personnel. And yet the notion of a referral from the president-elect posed a stark ideological conflict with the antiestablishment sensibility of Teen Vogue. As the backlash to McCammond exploded, and Condé Nast failed to assuage the public or employees, the magazine’s staff took steps to distance themselves from their new boss. On Twitter, they published a note condemning her offensive statements. Drafting the message was an exercise in both collective action and anxious restraint: “One thing that got lost in those edits,” a staffer told me, “was that this is about Condé management and our concerns as to what they think Teen Vogue is and what it means to lead a publication like this.”

The question of what Teen Vogue is has become the basis of escalating conflict in-house as, over the years, the magazine has changed considerably. When it entered the scene, in 2003, Teen Vogue was conceived as a high-fashion alternative to Seventeen and CosmoGirl, an outlet for aspiring upper-class socialites featuring mostly white, thin celebrities like Mischa Barton, Mandy Moore, and Ivanka Trump. The audience skewed more toward college-age readers than young teens. Amy Astley, the founding editor, said upon its debut, “We are going to do what we do well, which is fashion, beauty, and style.” Kara Jesella, the magazine’s first beauty editor, told me recently that Teen Vogue strove to be apolitical: “We were trying to make the content not not feminist. That was about the extent of the kind of activism we were doing.”

Since then, Teen Vogue has retained its passion for style, but transformed into a charmingly unholy, strangely coherent mix of explainers on Karl Marx, op-eds calling for prison abolition, and on-the-ground protest coverage from teens—all of which sit beside profiles of Jari Jones, a transgender model; a guide to oral sex; and the latest on Zayn Malik and Gigi Hadid. It’s a curious evolution for a publication within Condé Nast, a media conglomerate better known for being an institution of power than for challenging it. The contradictions are obvious: Teen Vogue maintains a socialist bent while trying to commodify its brand for advertisers primarily in the fashion and beauty industry. Yet its peculiar position in media has seemed, somehow, to work; the magazine has attracted bona fide leftists to its ranks as well as praise from unlikely admirers. In 2019, Jacobin, the socialist publication, ran a piece that declared: “Teen Vogue Is Good.”

Not everyone reads Teen Vogue—its website averages roughly seven million monthly unique views—yet it seems as if everyone has an opinion on it. The McCammond debacle proved no exception. Within a week, Ulta Beauty suspended an advertising campaign with Teen Vogue; McCammond, who would have been the magazine’s third Black editor in chief, was caught in a high-profile disaster. She apologized for her old tweets and announced her resignation before having started her first day. (“After speaking with Alexi this morning, we agreed that it was best to part ways, so as to not overshadow the important work happening at Teen Vogue,” Stan Duncan, Condé’s chief people officer, wrote in an email to the company.) The staff were rattled; they were soon inscribed into a narrative—first within right-wing media, then more broadly—of having organized to push McCammond out, despite the fact that they had no say in her hiring or departure. It was, critics claimed, an example of cancel culture run amok. People well outside of Teen Vogue’s demographic threatened to cancel their subscriptions.

The anxieties that Teen Vogue seems to awaken in the general public have proved to be analogous to how America sees teen girls, so frequently flattened into either Greta Thunberg–like saviors or overly woke children who need to be saved. Even when the response is praise, the tone tends to be patronizing. “I do think women’s media is often looked down upon in terms of politics, and that only gets further magnified when you add the teen girl to it,” Samhita Mukhopadhyay, a former executive editor of Teen Vogue, said. “It’s our constant denigration of young women and their ability to be intelligent political actors on their own.” Lately, as publications across Condé Nast have unionized, and there has been a rise in class consciousness across the journalism industry, the staff of Teen Vogue have been making increasingly bold efforts to carry the values they’ve instilled in the magazine off the page; organizing now continues apace. But in taking the political power of girls seriously, Teen Vogue presents a paradox, as its employees find themselves at odds with Condé Nast, a bastion of corporate media that sells ads to young women.

It was March 2016, just a few weeks after Beyoncé performed “Formation” at the Super Bowl, when Nancy Reagan died. Vogue paid tribute with a piece by Hamish Bowles, American Vogue’s international editor at large, who wrote of Reagan’s “brisk, polished, and generally faultless American high style.” Glamour, another Condé Nast magazine, published a similar homage, compiling a “most notable looks” slideshow of Nancy Reagan slow-dancing in a Galanos gown and walking alongside Princess Diana in a red Adolfo suit. Everything went the expected way of glossy coverage. That is, until a few days later, when Teen Vogue took a different

“Women’s media is often looked down upon in terms of politics, and that only gets further magnified when you add the teen girl to it.”

tack, publishing a piece with the headline: “Former First Lady Nancy Reagan Watched Thousands of LGBTQ People Die of aids.”

“That was when a sort of bomb went off internally,” Phillip Picardi, who had been hired the year before as Teen Vogue’s digital editorial director, told me. He had been brought in at the age of twenty-three to grow the online presence of the magazine—which still ran on a decade-old content management system—and to connect with actual teenagers. Picardi, who is gay, said that there was no way Teen Vogue was going to run a puff piece on Reagan. The price of the criticism was a torrent of hate mail that flooded the inboxes of Condé’s top executives. Picardi got a message that Wintour wanted to see him. He braced for a scolding—not only had Teen Vogue pissed off conservatives, it had also gone against its parent publication. But the meeting was suddenly called off. Later, he learned that he had been saved by an unlikely source: “Someone from Elton John’s aids Foundation emailed Anna, saying, ‘Thank you so much for Teen Vogue’s bravery in covering the truth of the story,’ ” Picardi recalled. “Long story short, I was not reprimanded for the piece.”

Picardi had been pushing for bold political coverage since before he started; when he interviewed with Astley, he presented a fortyfive-page deck on how Teen Vogue was underestimating its audience. He highlighted news stories he thought teenagers cared about that Teen Vogue had neglected to cover: Black Lives Matter protests, Indigenous rights, representational wins in Congress. “Amy was like, ‘You think teenagers would click on this?’ I said, ‘Yes, there’s a chance we can make real waves here.’ ” Astley brought him on and gave him her blessing. Elaine Welteroth was the beauty editor at the time; soon, at the age of twentynine, she was promoted to run the print magazine, becoming the youngest and second Black editor in chief in Condé Nast history. Along with Marie Suter, the creative director,

the new guard at Teen Vogue prepared to take on the emergent Donald Trump era.

One of Picardi’s early hires was Sade Strehlke, who came from the Wall Street Journal and was put in charge of Teen Vogue’s budding political coverage, along with that on wellness, home decor, and campus life— essentially everything aside from the core fashion, beauty, and entertainment fodder. Early posts on the Republican debates were largely ignored or slammed by commenters on social media, who told Teen Vogue to stay in its lane. But the magazine kept trying. Strehlke described the sense of reinvention in the office as akin to working in a startup within a legacy institution. The team became one of the most diverse at Condé Nast; its political coverage grew more ambitious. Teen Vogue produced videos interviewing Native American girls about Standing Rock and published an advice essay by Hillary Clinton (“Vote, and inspire others to vote too”).

At the same time, Teen Vogue, like most publications chasing BuzzFeed-style virality, fell prey to some of the worst compulsions of the clickbait era; the magazine was publishing as many as seventy posts per day, with a staff of around fifteen people. Most of those pieces focused on classic girl-glossy topics (a makeup hack listicle, “runway inspired” prom looks); many of the political takes were basic-liberal (“You’ll Get Chills When You Listen to Hillary Clinton’s 1969 Wellesley Commencement Speech”). But by one metric, the content strategy proved successful: in its first year, the My Life vertical, which included politics, rose in traffic by 400 percent. “The evolution of wokeness from 2015 to 2016 across American culture was huge,” Strehlke said. “We just jumped on that bandwagon, and the audience came. They were always there—they just didn’t know we were there for them.”

The higher-ups at Condé Nast paid attention mainly when something broke through the news—like the Nancy Reagan obituary or, that December, a column called “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America.” Written by Lauren Duca, who was working on contract as a Teen Vogue weekend editor, the piece was seen more than a million times and boosted by celebrities. (“Donald Trump is our president now,” Duca declared. “It’s time to wake up.”) Many readers expressed their surprise that a magazine for teenagers could be so incisive; others pointed out the condescension of

Who’s the Boss?

Teen Vogue’s leadership has changed frequently in recent years, creating “confusion and chaos” for the staff.

Anna Wintour

As the editor in chief of Vogue and global content adviser at Condé Nast, Wintour presides over Teen Vogue from behind her signature sunglasses.

Elaine Welteroth

From May 2016 to January 2018, Welteroth served as editor of Teen Vogue; she was known to run a tough shop. She resigned after Condé Nast killed the print edition.

Phillip Picardi

As digital editorial director, Picardi established Teen Vogue’s hard-charging political coverage at the start of the Trump era. He remained until August 2018.

that view and noted that Teen Vogue had been covering politics for more than a year. Duca became a star—even more so after a combative appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show, on Fox, in which he told her to “stick to the thighhigh boots.”

“All of a sudden,” Picardi told me, “Vogue’s PR was all up in our business.” Condé’s communications machine, notoriously heavyhanded, loomed large. When the New York Times magazine profiled Welteroth, the author noted that a Condé publicist was constantly present. Here was a campaign to be carefully managed: the publication that had once featured Ivanka Trump was suddenly on the map as the center of the #Resistance against her father. As Welteroth told the Times: “We’ve come to stand for something, and it has resonated.”

The buzz proved to executives that Teen Vogue’s political branding was popular, and thus monetizable. In 2017, Picardi was given a budget to hire a dedicated politics editor; he brought in Alli Maloney, who had just spent over a year reporting on institutionalized racism in the Columbus Police Department. Maloney, to whom many staffers attribute the magazine’s sharp left turn, worked with columnists like Kim Kelly, a labor reporter who wrote a widely read explainer on unions, and brought on Lucy Diavolo, who published hard-charging political columns. The site continued to elevate teen voices through interviews and commissions, including an op-ed by Emma González in the wake of the Parkland shooting. “I wanted the mission to be reflecting the intelligence of young and marginalized people whose perspectives were being dismissed,” Maloney said. Teen Vogue’s traffic shot up exponentially, from two million monthly unique views in mid-2015 to twelve million less than two years later.

For the most part, staffers who worked on Teen Vogue’s political coverage felt free to set the site’s direction without interference from above; most were doubtful that Wintour or other executives read much of the site or fully understood the political changes as they were happening. Wintour seemed more hands-on when it came to Teen Vogue’s fashion and beauty coverage, which mattered most to the advertisers on whom Condé Nast relies. (Peoples Wagner told me that, at least during her tenure, Wintour was “incredibly involved” with all aspects of the publication, including politics; they met weekly. “She

Lindsay Peoples Wagner

Hired as editor of Teen Vogue in October 2018, Peoples Wagner brought a focus on fashion; the pace of Trump coverage eased. She left in January 2021.

Alexi McCammond

McCammond was named editor of Teen Vogue in March 2021. A whirlwind of controversy ensued, and she resigned before her first day.

Versha Sharma

Appointed in May 2021, Sharma, the current editor of Teen Vogue, inherited some baggage from her predecessors. She has promised be a supportive leader.

After Biden’s inauguration, Wintour sat down Teen Vogue staffers and asked them whether the magazine should continue covering politics.

had a lot of opinions on where our coverage was going and read the site.”) But what was overlooked, amid the magazine’s ideological transition, were the many ways in which the politics of its fashion coverage could be just as controversial as the politics section itself—Teen Vogue would call in broad terms for capitalism to be dismantled without anyone batting an eye, yet the magazine placed less emphasis on reporting that scrutinized the labor conditions of garment workers. The same tension could frequently be found in Duca’s writing; the spectacle around her “gaslighting” piece belied the fact that her takes (obvious at best, reductive at worst) were actually behind the times. (“Duca exemplifies a trend typical in contemporary feminist thinking: the belief that any woman in power must be a good woman,” as Haley Mlotek wrote in a review of Duca’s book.) The superficiality of the pussy-hat moment was already being drowned out by Teen Vogue’s sharpening political voice. T een Vogue received national acclaim for its political journalism, yet profit did not immediately follow. Picardi recalled the frustrations of working with a revenue team inside a behemoth media company that he felt was “stuck in its ways” and unable to capture Teen Vogue’s sensibility. “They were scared because the tone of the publication was just a lot more aggressively progressive than they were used to,” he said. “It was hard to convey that to the right advertisers and right marketers.” By November 2017, when Condé Nast laid off eighty people across the company, it announced that the print edition of Teen Vogue would be eliminated. Staff found out about the cuts through a Women’s Wear Daily article. In her book More than Enough: Claiming Space for Who You Are (No Matter What They Say), Welteroth writes that she was given only last-minute notice of the closure: “I knew on a gut level that pulling the plug on the magazine this abruptly after a year of record growth and with promising

new ventures on the horizon was ill advised.” She met with the CEO of Condé Nast to make a case for keeping print, and asked: “If the company is not prepared to invest in the future of Teen Vogue, would you consider allowing me to help find an investor who is?” The answer was no.

In January 2018, Welteroth resigned from the company. (She wrote of the decision: “My mission at Teen Vogue was to make young people whose voices had been marginalized feel seen, centered, and celebrated. Anna had given me the space and permission to fulfill that mission. I did what I came to do.”) Picardi turned his attention to launching them, a Condé-branded LGBTQ title, but left later that year to run Out magazine. Wintour signaled a return to Teen Vogue’s fashion roots by hiring Peoples Wagner, then the fashion editor at The Cut, as the magazine’s next editor in chief. As the months went by, in a churn of layoffs and reshuffling, employees began to lose patience. “The management changes constantly meant there were new labor experiences that differed from the last, so the ways that we had to work shifted, and that created total confusion and chaos,” Maloney said. In two years at Teen Vogue, she had five bosses.

Under Peoples Wagner, the pace started to become more humane, slowing down from the clickbait days. “Being a newsroom where every single thing that Trump says has to be something we report on is exhausting,” Peoples Wagner said. “It felt like we needed to get to a place where we obviously would pay attention to the news but have a bit more of a curated perspective.” To pull in new sources of revenue, she placed an emphasis on events, like the Teen Vogue annual summit, backed by companies such as Victoria’s Secret and Google; during the pandemic, the magazine hosted a “virtual prom” sponsored by Axe and Chipotle. The publication became sustainable and profitable. (As Peoples Wagner told me, she was “intentional in choosing stories, themes, and people that still aligned with what we wanted to do, but were also exciting to certain advertisers and helped sustain the health of the brand. Because ultimately, if we don’t have a place to do this work, then what was the point of this all?”) All the while, Mukhopadhyay, who had recently started her tenure, steered the politics section along with an editor named Allegra Kirkland; the team covered climate strikes and advocated abolishing landlords. “Teen Vogue had pivoted to covering more politics, but they had yet to fully integrate it into the brand,” Mukhopadhyay said. “I was hired to help do that, and my interest was in deepening the reporting and analysis and showcasing the real force young people were emerging as in the political landscape.”

Peoples Wagner was also political in her way, pushing Teen Vogue to feature those who were not traditionally found in the pages of Condé Nast glossies. “When you talk about the traditional fashion industry, it’s often based in European beauty standards,” she said. “For me, it was really important to make sure that if I’m a young person reading Teen Vogue that I feel seen and heard on this site every single day.” Sammie Scott, a former social media manager at Teen Vogue, said that when she started, in 2017, around a third of the staff were Black, which was unusual—and exciting—for a major publication. “We were politically forward,” Scott said. “Mainstream Black publications wouldn’t have been able to do the same things that I was able to do at Teen Vogue.”

During the same period, a boom in labor organizing reverberated across the media world; staffers grew more vocal about diversity, fair pay, and editorial standards. Within Condé Nast, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, Wired, and Ars Technica unionized. At Teen Vogue, a sense of collective energy percolated through the staff, who at times made their frustrations with management public. Last year, when the site published a glowing article about how Facebook was “helping ensure the integrity of the 2020 election,” without a byline, and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, shared the piece on social media, the story began trending; as it turned out, the article was a paid advertisement—and most of the staff had no clue. A reader tweeted, “What is this Teen Vogue?” Scott composed a reply from the magazine’s official account: “literally idk.” Wintour sent down a directive to delete the tweet, which Scott did, while executives scrambled to respond to criticism; in the end, the article, which Facebook claimed was a “misunderstanding,” came down. When I asked Scott about the tweet, she said, “Here’s the thing—it was a good idea. I stand by it.” The episode may have been an embarrassing misfire for the company’s corporate-sponsorship strategy, but for the staff it was an opportunity to punch up, in keeping with their vision for the Teen Vogue brand.

In discussions about Teen Vogue and its discontents, it’s often forgotten that teen magazines have always been political— that was true as far back as the Victorian era. “The magazine has always been a space way more for girls than for boys,” Natalie Coulter, an associate professor of communications at York University, told me. “It’s something that can be done in private spaces, because girls can’t take to the streets the same ways that boys can— there’s safety issues boys don’t have to face.” Publications for teen girls can provide a forum for self-actualization; they have also, historically, been colonialist—the conservative contradictions of teen mags started early on.

So it makes a certain sense that Seventeen, the prevailing teen publication of the modern age, was founded in 1944 by Walter Hubert