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Combative questions engineered to be TV “moments”
KILL LIST
Combative questions engineered to be TV “moments”
In June, after Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin had their first meeting, each held a press conference. Kaitlan Collins, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, posed a question: “Why are you so confident he’ll change his behavior, Mr. President?” Biden stuck a finger out and replied, “What the hell?” He later apologized for being “short.” But in fairness, the question—a projection of the president’s thoughts—was intended to be provocative, and succeeded mainly in generating a day’s worth of meta-analysis on cable news. Annenberg, a Republican media tycoon and close friend of Ronald Reagan’s. Under Helen Valentine, the magazine’s first editor, Seventeen forged a lucrative business in an untapped market, filling its pages with more advertising than any other women’s outlet before. To help advertisers visualize the demographic, the magazine invented “Teena, the Prototypical Teenage Girl,” a white sixteen-year-old from a middle-class family with a penchant for spending, whose favorite thing to read was, of course, Seventeen. The original influencer, she was “within a few years of a job . . . a husband . . . a home of her own,” per the pitch. “Open-minded, impressionable, at an age when she’s interested in anything new, Teena is a girl well worth knowing— surely worth cultivating.” Articles advised on how to diet and keep a boyfriend; Seventeen prescribed a traditional view of young womanhood. Other publishers spawned their versions—YM, CosmoGirl, Elle Girl—but it was Seventeen that lasted through the years, albeit now in pared-back form.
While Seventeen remained dominant, Sassy, which debuted in 1988 under the editorship of Jane Pratt, became beloved for being political in a different way: a feminist alternative to the usual glossy teen fare. With a staff that averaged twenty-four years of age, Sassy ran pieces on losing your virginity alongside roundups of the best cheap makeup—because, as the editors wrote, “even though a certain president with the initials G.B. says the recession is over, we know better.” The magazine cultivated community; as Jesella and Marisa Meltzer write in their book How Sassy Changed My Life (2007), Sassy’s draw was how it “questioned all the tenets that other teen magazines held dear.” It understood that fashion, beauty, and politics were not separate categories.
Sassy shuttered in 1994, but its ethos went on to influence online publications—among them Tavi Gevinson’s now-defunct Rookie, notable for being staffed and led by teenagers. Sassy’s progeny also included Jezebel, The Hairpin, Worn, Feministing, Bitch, and Bust. Kate Dries, a former Jezebel editor, has compared these sites to “consciousness-raising circles,” crediting them with expanding the scope of women’s magazines. “One hopes we reach a point where they’re no longer a necessary antidote to a flawed system, but simply a cohesive part of an improved landscape,” she wrote in 2014. Teens blogging on Tumblr, and now posting on Instagram and TikTok, carry the torch, demonstrating an audience for inclusive, queer, and Marxist storytelling.
Now, as one of the last teen publications standing, Teen Vogue has surpassed even Sassy’s political chutzpah. When I spoke with Coulter, she acknowledged a tension between the way Teen Vogue at once politicizes teen girls and markets to them. But, she said, “one of the only places they have a voice is in consumer commodity capitalism, particularly because they’re kids—they’re not working, they’re not in halls of power, and there’s not a lot of spaces for them. These kinds of media spaces are often where girls can be political.”
Being editorially assertive can, however, pose challenges to a publication’s bottom line. “Teen magazines have always been known to be extremely beholden to advertisers, particularly because advertisers have particular feelings about teenage girls,” as Jesella told me. In the first year of Sassy, right-wing religious groups called for a boycott
over the magazine’s sex positivity; advertisers began to withdraw. Teen Vogue ignited a similar conservative firestorm in 2017, when it published a guide to anal sex. Right-wing mommy bloggers and members of pro-life organizations began tweeting a campaign to #PullTeenVogue. Skittish companies canceled their ads; staff members received violent threats. Scott said that some angry readers even called the FBI. “What’s the FBI going to do?” Scott said. “They’re like, ‘Let me know if any of them are communists for real.’ ”
Sarah Emily Baum, who was a Teen Vogue reader before she became a contributor, at the age of seventeen, told me that the magazine made her feel valued as a participant in the political discourse. “A huge amount of the op-eds are written by students, compared to other national news outlets,” she said. Commentary that trivializes Teen Vogue’s political coverage tends to downplay the importance of personal knowledge, she added. “It begs the question: Who would more authentically or accurately report on, say, queer experiences? A seventeen-yearold queer reporter, or a fully grown adult reporter who is straight and cisgender and doesn’t have any queer friends but has a master’s in journalism?”
If leftist ideals have become a defining feature of Teen Vogue’s coverage, they have not always been reflected in the workplace. During Welteroth and Picardi’s era, the publication’s staff became one of the youngest and most diverse teams at Condé Nast; those employees—now eleven people in editorial, and around twenty in total— have been responsible for elevating the magazine’s inclusion and class consciousness. But company-wide, Condé Nast has remained a largely white place (according to an internal report, 77 percent of the senior leadership and 69 percent of the editorial staff are white), with vast gulfs in compensation between high- and low-level employees. Maloney recalled that, when she asked a manager to address pay disparities at Teen Vogue, she was told, “You all shouldn’t be talking among yourselves about how much you make.” There is a pervasive sense, staff members told me, that one should feel lucky just to be there.
That dynamic has, at times, presented a conflict of principles: while the magazine’s articles have promoted mental health at work, employees have been pushed to the limit. A former Teen Vogue employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me that she worked from her grandmother’s wake—the one day she’d taken off all year. In the office with Welteroth and Picardi, people said, it was common to see colleagues cry at their desks. Twice, medics were called to assist people who had fainted in the bathroom, which their colleagues said was caused by stress. “All of the voices we were saying we stood for were run bone dry in that office,” Maloney told me. “I got so used to being at my desk at night. The motion sensor lights would turn off, and I’d wave my arms so they’d turn back on—and I wouldn’t be alone in the office. When I got home, I would continue working. It became so intense that I would preschedule my emails so they went out at 8am—at a normal time—but I was writing them at three or four in the morning.”
Most of the employees I spoke with, past and present, blamed the dysfunction primarily on Condé Nast’s corporate bosses; some believed that Teen Vogue’s managers—often young, of color, and underresourced—were at fault, too, but had been set up to fail. Welteroth writes in her book about being underpaid and overworked; she found herself up against “ever-tightening budget constraints, a shrinking staff, and some of the same systemic issues that made work feel like an uphill battle.” Picardi wrote last year about his “ferocious ambition” at Condé Nast, which mingled with a fear that he “would be revealed as an impostor.” To prove himself, he worked from seven in the morning to ten or eleven at night; weekends, too. When I asked how he may have contributed to a toxic office culture, he told me that he had a “multiplicity of regrets.” Feeding the clickbait economy had grown Teen Vogue’s brand, but it was complicated. “I wish I didn’t look at corporate KPIs as a metric of success and had looked at how my employees were feeling coming to work every day,” he said. It was a tough balance. “I never would have kept my job if those were the metrics of success.” Peoples
Wagner told me, “We didn’t have the same resources as a lot of the other publications, and that can be frustrating as an editor when you have really big ideas and want to create an amazing body of work.” She was proud of what the magazine accomplished, she said; still, “it is no secret I wanted Teen Vogue to be able to do more.”
In the past year, Condé Nast has been forced to acknowledge racism in its workplace and in its coverage. The most obvious example: Adam Rapoport, the editor in chief of Bon Appétit, resigned after a photo circulated of him dressed in brownface; employees of color at the magazine then revealed how much less they’d made compared with their white counterparts. During last summer’s protests against racist policing, Wintour apologized to Black members of her staff, writing: “I want to say plainly that I know Vogue has not found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators. We have made mistakes, too, publishing images or stories that have been hurtful or intolerant. I take full responsibility for those mistakes.” When I reached out for an update, Condé Nast provided a statement: “It’s been a top priority for our People team to evolve our compensation processes and systems over the past year, including a new and uniform job architecture with standard levels and ways of ensuring consistency and equity across our organization.”
Many at Teen Vogue said that the situation there has been especially complicated. Since the start of this year, both Peoples Wagner and Mukhopadhyay have left their jobs. Around Inauguration Day, with Trump gone, Wintour sat down with members of the Teen Vogue staff and questioned whether the magazine should continue covering politics. There was the McCammond controversy. Right-wing media dug up tweets from a Teen Vogue social media editor who had used the N-word. In April, Condé Nast promoted Danielle Kwateng, Teen Vogue’s entertainment and culture director, to become the new executive editor. “We at Teen Vogue have read your comments and emails and we have seen the pain and frustration caused by resurfaced social media posts,” Kwateng wrote in a statement published on the magazine’s site. “While our staff continued doing the groundbreaking and progressive work we’re known for, we stopped posting it on social media as we turned inward and had a lot of tough discussions about who we are and what comes next.”
Rather than stick around, some Teen Vogue employees have opted to give up on their media careers. Scott, who quit at the end of 2020 to work for a beauty company, told me that her mother once asked if she would ever return to Condé Nast—if, say, she were offered a top role. “A lot of things would have to be different,” Scott said. “Anna would have to be dead or something.” (That was mostly a joke, though Wintour’s power can feel so immense to employees that it seems to have grown beyond her.) Scott continued: “I can’t imagine being a Black person in a leadership role at Condé—if you aren’t already a terrible person, it’s going to make you a terrible person.”
In May, after the dust from McCammond’s ill-fated appointment had mostly cleared, Condé Nast announced that Versha Sharma, the managing editor of NowThis, a video-news platform, would be the new editor in chief of Teen Vogue. Sharma—who is thirty-five, with long, swooping black hair and a sense of style that is more approachable-journalist than high-fashion maven—was eager for everyone to move on from what had just transpired. “It’s not my place to comment on that,” she told me. “The team is in a good place right now, where everybody’s excited to focus on our work.”
That work appeared to be continuing on with the magazine as she found it. The June digital cover story profiled Marie Newman, a Democratic member of Congress, and Evie, her transgender twenty-year-old daughter, in their fight against anti-trans legislation. In August, Sharma unveiled the first cover she’d commissioned, on Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, which she described as “brown girl vibes + back to school all in one.” She also pointed me to an interview Teen Vogue ran with a Texas valedictorian who went viral when she switched out her graduation speech to talk about abortion rights. “Nobody else in the industry who interviewed her can do it the way that Teen Vogue can,” Sharma said,
“because it was a young person talking to another young person who really understands what we’re up against.”
Sharma didn’t want to mess with what made Teen Vogue appealing. Even with Trump out of office, she told me, she saw no reason to change the political sensibility— and besides, the fact that socialist politics have become both a practice and a trend has implications for the currency of the magazine. “I’m excited to show that, regardless of who the president is, young people want to hold them accountable,” she said. She was pleased with an op-ed calling on Biden to sign an executive order canceling student debt. (“So far Biden has offered nothing but stall tactics,” it read.) Over the summer, the magazine published an obituary that harked back to Nancy Reagan’s: “Donald Rumsfeld, Former Defense Secretary and Accused War Criminal, Dead at 88.” (Picardi tweeted the piece approvingly, with a note: “Aaaand they’re back!”) Sharma’s ambitions for growth focus on video, drawing on her background at NowThis. “That was one area of improvement that I saw, coming into this role,” she told me, “because young audiences are the biggest audience for video, social video, YouTube, TikTok, whatever it may be. So I think there’s a lot more we can do there that will hopefully lend itself well to revenue as well.”
When it comes to the office environment at Teen Vogue, Sharma said that “work-life balance is incredibly important.” She had heard the complaints of the past. “I’m very sensitive to the fact that people are burned out,” she said. “I’ve gone through burnout myself, and I completely understand that—just like I want to emphasize young people’s mental health, I want to make sure we’re doing that internally, too.” The mood today, it seems, teeters between positivity and nihilism; Teen Vogue staffers are fully aware of the strange tension in producing justice-oriented and socialist coverage in the service of a historically racist and classist company, even as they are proud of the work they’ve been able to accomplish within those constraints. I asked Sharma how she felt coming into that dynamic. “I have a very outspoken background on all of those issues, including in the journalism industry,” she said. “I’m brand new, but so far executive leadership has been really receptive to these conversations. I think my hiring is kind of like the proof in the pudding that they’re listening—they’re listening to staff, they’re listening to the audience.” Thus far, Sharma added, Wintour has been “really supportive.” (A Condé Nast publicist was present for our call.)
Around the time I spoke with Sharma, union organizing at Condé Nast was heating up. In June, during protracted contract negotiations with staffers of The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Ars Technica, the company narrowly avoided a strike: they ratified their first union contract, which included a base salary of fiftyfive thousand dollars that would rise to sixty thousand by 2023, a cap on healthcare cost increases, and defined working hours. The deal applied only to those three publications but set a precedent for employees across the company. “This agreement sets a great example for the rest of the industry, and I’m excited to see that put in practice,” Sharma told me. She’s likely to hear more about union organizing plans soon.
In a sense, the fact that Teen Vogue still exists is a feat; for years now, there has been a looming sense that Condé Nast might decide it’s more of a hassle to keep the magazine running than to deal with the public relations nightmare of shutting it down. A union battle could complicate matters. But if the company wants to stay relevant and retain talent, it will need to find a way to support the people and politics able to carry it into the future.
Recently, Maloney told me that she remembered a speech Wintour gave during an office party—a gathering to celebrate Peoples Wagner’s hiring along with the promotion of top editors at them and GQ. “Anna’s introducing these new editors and explaining what a group of visionaries they are and what a moment it is in time,” Maloney recalled. Then, she said, Wintour ended her speech with a request to the staff: “So please don’t leave.”
Maloney went wide-eyed. “I was shocked that she said that, because she must know,” she said. “She knows why the talent leaves.” Within a month, Maloney resigned from Teen Vogue with no job lined up. cjr
For much of its history, political journalism has trained its cameras, recorders, and notebooks on the most powerful players: politicians and bureaucrats, along with the businesspeople and lobbyists who influence them. But the constituents who elect public officials, and to whom they are meant to be accountable, are often invisible in news coverage. The 2016 election and the Trump administration made those deficits glaring, as fault lines in neutrality and “objectivity” cracked before the eyes of the public. Journalists collided with a White House prone to lies and cruelty. Since then, reporters have been tasked with the challenge of self-evaluation: What mistakes did we make? In what ways were we reactive, instead of forcing politicians to engage with questions important to the American people? What have we learned, and how can we do better with Joe Biden and whoever comes next?
In March, ABC News promoted Averi Harper, who is thirty, to deputy political director. Harper has covered local politics and national elections, including the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris, now vice president. Recently, I spoke with Harper about her new role, the need to grasp the complexities of diverse communities, and how political journalism can realign itself post-Trump. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
AVERI HARPER
NEASON How are you?
HARPER Can’t complain. I just ran to get coffee. I’ve been up since five o’clock in the morning.
NEASON Do you have fixed hours?
HARPER Hopefully I’ll be done after World News Tonight, which ends at seven o’clock. But it’s really whatever the news cycle demands, right? So there are days when I am working from sunup to sundown, especially when it comes to election time. I’ll be working around the clock. And I think that just has been normal for me—for all of us. Sometimes I get a break here at seven o’clock at night on a Friday, and, you know, the entire news division and all of our resources go to covering that big story. That’s just the name of the game.
NEASON Since the inauguration, what have you spent your days doing?
HARPER Well, I get up and I’m reading every bit of political news that I can before I hit morning meetings. Or I’m talking to our reporters about what they’re working on for the day, or to the heads of different platforms at ABC News to figure out what they are covering for the day—how they’re planning to approach coverage. And then one of the great things about my role is that it’s not only a management position, but I still contribute editorially. So I am making source calls. I am talking to lawmakers. I’m talking to different folks within the political world in order to get their read on what’s going on. Some days there’s presidential remarks. We’re always keeping our eyes on what’s happening on Capitol Hill. And then I spend a lot of my afternoon writing. We have a political newsletter that goes out every day that I contribute to. I’m also thinking of ways to stay ahead of the news cycle and figure out how I can get all the great minds together at ABC News to make sure that our coverage is inclusive, that our coverage is strong, and that our coverage is differentiated from what other people are doing. So that’s kind of my day-to-day.
NEASON On that note, about differentiating ABC from what others are doing: How do you do that when—particularly for political journalism, which has traditionally revolved around the White House press corps, press gaggles, campaign events—all the reporters from all the outlets go to the same event?
HARPER Right. There is a tendency—the term is pack journalism—to try to just match everything with what everyone else is getting and not necessarily generate your own ideas. And I think that’s where diversity sometimes comes into play. I am very proud that ABC News had one of the most diverse broadcast teams covering the last presidential election. And because of that, we were able to kind of pool our ideas and figure out: What are the questions that I should be asking, that I know that my colleagues at the other large networks are not going to be doing? For me specifically, in the coverage of Kamala Harris—Kamala Harris is the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant. I am from the West Indies. My mother is from Jamaica. My father is from Trinidad and Tobago. And so I leaned into that specialized knowledge that I knew that no one else who was covering her had, to generate stories, to generate content, and to put out some understanding about where she comes from and why she might appeal to different segments of the electorate.
Sometimes it’s just as simple as geographically where I live. I covered Bernie Sanders during the primary, and I’d lived in Northern California as a reporter for a local station there. So I knew how important the AsianAmerican vote was to California. About 15 percent of the electorate in California is Asian American. And Bernie Sanders, at the time—he was printing campaign materials in so many different languages, Asian languages. It wasn’t just Mandarin. It was Japanese and Korean. It was all these different languages that other campaigns just were not doing. And so I had been there for a campaign event in Oakland, and I had gone to the farmers’ market that I would frequent when I lived there, in Chinatown, in Oakland. And I noticed that the only campaign materials that I saw at that farmers’ market were from Bernie Sanders. And so I said, Well, that’s a story. That’s how you differentiate. It’s just leaning into who you are and where you come from and your experiences in order to find ways to highlight communities and people who
are not typically included in the conversation when we’re talking about politics. I think when you look at political journalism as a whole, it’s very white and very male. And I am not any of those things. So I bring a different perspective.
NEASON You mentioned being at the farmers’ market. It wasn’t just that Bernie Sanders was the only candidate placing material, making an effort in that location. But also that you were there, and that you were asking questions other reporters weren’t. That brings up the question: What is a political news story? There are the traditional routes to what has been considered a story for a political reporter. We know where we go to get those, and that perhaps doesn’t include the Chinatown farmers’ market. Are we broadening our ideas of what political news is to better fit the reality, that basically everything is politics? HARPER I think there is a tendency in political journalism to cover things in the abstract. What I’ve said to the team of reporters that I manage is that politics is about the people. It’s about how policy is impacting people at home. You don’t necessarily start with Capitol Hill. So for example, for voting rights in Georgia, I encouraged our reporters to find the people who were impacted. It’s not just talking about or listening to the committee meeting in the statehouse, in Atlanta. It’s about who’s outside the statehouse, who cares enough to be outside the statehouse to protest, who’s going to be impacted if and when those restrictive voting bills pass. And so across our network, I’m always going to be encouraging folks to find the character-driven story, to bring life to these issues that can be really hard to digest in the abstract.
from politicians and toward the people who are affected by the work that politicians do—I think certainly there are a lot of outlets and a lot of reporters who have tried to do that, with varying degrees of success. But a general criticism is that political journalism, particularly in the Trump era, has been so obsessed with our figureheads, to the detriment of the people who are materially affected every day by their decisions. So I wonder, who do you see? Are there particular segments of the public that you’re especially interested in focusing the camera on?
HARPER I think that covering Latino voters in the midterms and in 2024 is an imperative. The AAPI community is an imperative. Black voters continue to be very important to the outcome of elections, particularly for the Democratic Party. This country is growing more diverse, and it behooves us to ensure that we are covering these communities appropriately and thoroughly, because these communities are going to be the margins in elections. I also think rural voters—you know, we’ve been talking a lot about climate justice. I have a colleague who has spent a lot of time focusing on water issues in places like South Carolina, among those who are poor. And it’s not to say that any one community is more important than another, but it is to ensure that we see all of these communities.
NEASON I want to kind of zoom out a little bit. In your view, just as a Black woman in America, what is your conception of what we even mean when we say “politics”?
HARPER When we say politics, I think of policy—any sort of legislation that impacts the way I live my life every single day. So it is how much money is taken out of my paycheck. It is where I can afford to live. It is if I can afford to go to school or if I can afford to send my children to school. It is how good those schools are. It is if I can afford to go to the doctor; it’s if I feel comfortable about going to the doctor, as a Black woman. There is not a part of my life that I can say politics does not touch. And as a woman, and a Black woman at that, that impacts me differently than it would some of my white colleagues or my male colleagues. And I think it is important that we acknowledge that. I say often, as a Black woman, how much of everything in my life is about politics: how I wear my hair is about politics, the clothes I wear when I go out in the street, how I talk to you versus how I would talk to my mom versus how I would talk to my boss. That’s politics. Oh, that is politics. And so it is finding ways to illustrate that, and make it understood to our viewers. A lot of times people think that, Well, politics is something that happens far away, in Washington, DC. That’s not it. It is every single thing.
NEASON Given that, do you think that the center of gravity in political journalism is in the right place now?
HARPER I think it’s people’s tendency to look at the very biggest picture, the biggest figurehead, which is the president of the United States, and think that is the person and that is the office that does the absolute most for them. Not knowing, necessarily, that it is their county commissioners, or their city council person, who’s making decisions that are the closest to them, that impact them every single day. I mean, that’s not to say that the president doesn’t have power and the president is not important. But it is all of those offices, it’s all of those things. So I think we are kind of seeing a whole recalibration after four years in which everybody was focused on the president, because the Trump presidency was inflammatory in so many ways. Now, because we’re not focused on the erratic behavior that we saw coming out of the White House, we have more time to focus and say, Hey, what’s going on in statehouses? and What’s going on locally? How are our rights being eroded?
NEASON You can tell me if you agree or disagree with this, but I think that there’s a perception that, at national outlets in particular, the people who cover politics treat the presidential election as the most important and the most newsworthy event. How do you address that with a viewer who maybe has this idea that, like you said, politics is a thing that happens far away?
HARPER For national news outlets, because there’s so many states, it’s about tying together trends. So that’s why I keep coming back to the curtailing of voting rights, because that’s a trend we have been seeing for some time. We identify that Republican lawmakers in several states are putting forth legislation that holds back access to the ballot box. We’re continuing to tell our viewers that, and continuing to talk to state lawmakers. We had on Park Cannon, from Georgia, who was arrested after she knocked on Governor Kemp’s door while he was signing that very restrictive voting bill. When George Floyd was killed at the hands of police in Minnesota, we had leaders from that area come on our air. So it’s not just the president—it’s the governor of Minnesota, it’s folks who come from the city council in Minneapolis.
NEASON When it comes to social media, how do you consider the merits and pitfalls of focusing attention there?
HARPER This arose as we were covering the pandemic—when there was no campaign coverage because everybody was at home, for the
