Last week, several prominent staffers at Teen Vogue—including culture editor Kaitlyn NcNab and politics editor Lex McMenamin—took to socials to share bummer news. A round of layoffs had hit half the masthead. Six writers who’d made their names covering climate change, trans rights, race, and politics for the magazine had been caught in the cross-hairs.
On Thursday, management framed the lay-offs as part of a larger brand pivot: Teen Vogue’s parent company, Condé Nast, wished to reposition the outlet under an older editorial umbrella. As NPR reported, Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Versha Sharma was out. Going forward, Chloe Malle, the new “head of editorial content” for American Vogue, would “oversee” the outlet.
Writer and former Teen Vogue politics editor Allegra Kirkland put this all plain, in a Talking Points Memo: “That’s Condé Nast-ese for ‘we’re laying off nearly the entire team and stripping the publication for parts.’”
Why kill the brand now? In the last few years, Teen Vogue has rebranded itself as a beacon for rigorous, progressive, gender-expansive-feminist journalism, with a singular focus on how today’s biggest issues affect the teens. This year, the site received the Roosevelt Institute’s prestigious Four Freedoms Award for exemplifying free speech and expression.
For the site, labor organizer Kim Kelly has written about high-profile union drives and organizing tactics. McMenamin has covered ICE raids targeting students. Sharma has published viral profiles, like this cover story on Elon Musk’s estranged daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson. And the stable has regularly broken stories about the Black Live Matter protests, gender affirming health care, and student debt.
But this new mission clearly ruffled feathers. Yesterday, Sarah Leonard of the Columbia Journalism Review read the writing on the wall. Noting murmurs of up-top dissent re: the site’s recent coverage of Palestine and other leftie causes, Leonard speculated that a “politically progressive editorial stance” is no longer welcome at Condé Nast.
Unfortunately, evidence mounts for her case. Last Thursday, a group of Condé employees approached HR to protest the effective folding of Teen Vogue.
In a widely circulated video, editorial staffers—including Jasper Lo, a senior fact checker at The New Yorker; Jake Lahut, a senior politics reporter for WIRED; Alma Avalle, a digital staffer at Bon Appétit; and Ben Dewey, a video staffer with Condé Nast Entertainment—criticized management for recent abrupt decisions. But management clapped back.
Lo, Lahut, Avalle and Dewey were fired for what the company is now calling “extreme misconduct.”
NewsGuild, the union representing most Condé Nast employees, mounted a swift response. In a statement, the union called the firings “illegal,” and in “flagrant breach” of the Just Cause terms in all staffers’ contracts. They also dinged Condé for union-busting, noting that three of the fired staffers were active in union leadership.
And that’s where we stand.
As Truthout reported yesterday, “the fact that the layoffs and seemingly union-related terminations come amid a right-wing pivot by media bosses feels more than coincidental and is not lost on the union.” Nor, I fear, the readers.
In her state of the site report, Leonard, who’s also the founding editor of the feminist Lux magazine, elegized Teen Vogue—and underlined its importance to the landscape. “By ending Teen Vogue as we knew it, Condé Nast didn’t just kill its own relevance with a large swath of loyal Gen Z readers—it dealt a blow to the larger ecosystem of feminist media.”
Here’s hoping we can find a way to nurture and support those excellent affected Teen Vogue writer/editors (eight in total), wherever they land. Here, Kirkland has collected handles for the laid off staffers.
And as their case proceeds, you can support the fired four here.