We’re currently watching a war on youth media. While the 2010s were hailed as the hey-day for alternative journalism – with digital, youth-focused outlets like gal-dem, Buzzfeed, Teen Vogue and Vice shaking up an establishment press landscape – the 2020s have seen just as many new media obituaries.
Over the best part of a decade, pillars of a youthful progressive media have been hollowed out. gal-dem, created by people of colour across marginalised gender identities, shuttered in 2023 after an eight-year run. Bitch Media, another key early byline for many feminist writers, closed in 2022 after 26 years. Tavi Gevinson’s teen magazine Rookie folded, BuzzFeed News dissolved after winning a Pulitzer, and Vice filed for bankruptcy – announcing that it was “restructuring” and significantly downsizing its news division.
While certainly influential, many of these outlets faced a steady stream of critique from the left for not always taking explicit political stances, especially towards the end of their lifetimes. Yet their closures remind us that our silences rarely protect us, and even outlets that “avoid” politics are ultimately shaped by them.
Our media economy is dominated by corporate capture and the private interests of the wealthy and powerful. Editorial decisions, coverage priorities, and staffing are constrained by the financial and political interests of advertisers, investors and parent companies. In doing this, they often prioritise low-risk, politically “neutral” (aka conservative) content over stories that challenge dominant narratives. This landscape is fundamentally hostile to insurgent, youth-driven journalism.
By 2025, Condé Nast’s announcement that Teen Vogue‘s website would be folded into Vogue.com came as another significant loss to the progressive media landscape. This “restructure” meant that 70% of Teen Vogue staffers would lose their jobs, including the politics editor and six members of its editorial team. These were the journalists who produced groundbreaking and award-winning coverage on subjects including reproductive rights, Palestine, trans healthcare, campus activism and federal policies. Most of those laid off were women of colour and trans people, according to Condé Nast union representatives.
The rise of Teen Vogue
Originally a commercially safe magazine offering palatable, market-friendly visions of girlhood, Teen Vogue was transformed by the appointment of Elaine Welteroth as editor in 2016. Welteroth became the second Black editor-in-chief in parent company Condé Nast’s history – and her appointment coincided with Trump’s electoral ascent. Joining digital director Philip Picardi (founding editor of Them) and creative director Marie Suter, Welteroth hit the ground running. By December of that year, the magazine’s political pivot drew public attention and critical acclaim after running an op-ed by columnist Lauren Duca titled “Donald Trump is Gaslighting America”.
Teen Vogue’s political coverage wasn’t a branding shift imposed from above. It was a grounded response to millennial and Gen Z readers’ hunger for media that reflected their lived experiences and spoke to their material realities. The magazine’s revamped journalistic output responded to a readership politicised by Black Lives Matter, anti-racist and feminist campus organising, and a growing global climate justice movement. Welteroth told the Guardian of an editorial approach that embraced risk: “I think our strategy was don’t ask for permission, be prepared to ask for forgiveness, and march forward letting your instincts guide you.”
Under Welteroth, print subscriptions reportedly rose 535% and web traffic increased from 2.7 million to 9.2 million unique visitors per year. Despite this, Condé Nast chose to close down the magazine’s print edition in 2017, and Welteroth departed shortly after.
The staff at the magazine carried the radical tradition forward regardless. Versha Sharma, the magazine’s next editor-in-chief was outspoken about improving working conditions at Condé Nast and workers’ efforts to unionise. The influence of politics director Allegra Kirkland and politics editor Lex McMenamin is evident in the outlet’s extensive coverage of student encampments for Palestine, as well as its practical guides, such as a step-by-step toolkit to starting an ICE Watch program. As civil rights attorney Scott Hechinger puts it: “they treated youth not as consumers but as participants in democracy”.
Many Teen Vogue writers have described the platform as both an editorial home and a political training ground. “There’s a huge misconception that Teen Vogue didn’t have rigorous processes because it catered to young people,” recalls one journalist Sierra Royster on X. “But that couldn’t be further from the truth.” Fortesa Latifi, a journalist with other bylines in Rolling Stone, The Cut, and The New York Times, adds: “I have never been fact-checked like I’ve been fact-checked at Teen Vogue, and I’ve written for almost every place you can think of.”
“Teen Vogue’s success was a threat to the narrative that woke doesn’t sell, that people don’t care about politics and that young people should be seen and not heard”
I recently sat down with journalist Michaela Makusha to discuss her experience writing a piece for Teen Vogue on the UK’s racist anti-immigration riots last Summer.
Unable to leave her house in Birmingham during the riots, she reflected on the catharsis of writing the story. Much of the mainstream coverage she’d observed had focused on fear-mongering and drawing parallels to uprisings of the 1970s and 1980s. “I wasn’t born then,” she explains, “and a lot of the people who read Teen Vogue weren’t born then.” Teen Vogue’s editorial approach gave her the space to reflect on how she and other Gen Z people of colour had grown to understand British racism through lived experience.
When I ask her what we will potentially lose with the magazine’s closure, she says: “It’s a very nurturing space… I kind of fear that if we don’t have that outlet for young journalists, that there won’t be as many people who are able to find their own unique voice.”
Teen Vogue became political because both its writers and its readers were political. By embracing youth as an oppressed class, it delivered journalism that reflected their material realities. The magazine’s success was a threat to the narrative that woke doesn’t sell, that people don’t care about politics and that young people should be seen and not heard.
Too good to last?
Teen Vogue’s closure shows how precarious it is to produce radical reporting inside legacy or investor-backed media. Focused on profit, investors flock to youth media during boom periods and flee at the first sign of volatility, particularly during economic downturns. An overreliance on tech giants also stacks the odds against this kind of journalism: algorithmic suppression dictates content, and SEO has become a surrogate for editorial strategy, privileging listicles, evergreen explainers, and advertorials over political reporting or cultural critique.
But the shuttering of youth media platforms isn’t just a natural and inevitable ebb and flow of a turbulent industry. Even when stories clearly resonate with readers and capture the zeitgeist, coverage that challenges mainstream political narratives or corporate-friendly ideologies can threaten advertisers and investors, who prefer low-risk, “brand-safe” content. As the Overton window shifts rightward with the return of Trump to the Oval Office, the space for progressive editorial work shrinks. Radical youth reporting often grates against the interests of those who fund media, rendering it structurally vulnerable even when reader demand is strong.
When explaining Teen Vogue’s closure, Condé Nast cited “ongoing challenges around scale and audience reach”. Yet the data tells a wildly different story: Teen Vogue’s exclusive March interview with Elon Musk’s estranged daughter Vivian Wilson was one of the top-performing stories of the year across the entire company.
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Condé United and the NewsGuild of New York described the layoffs as “a move clearly designed to blunt the award-winning magazine’s insightful journalism at a time when it is needed the most”. Allegra Kirkland, the magazine’s former politics director, also pointed out that it is the magazine’s most political sections being axed in the restructure – with “career development” and “cultural leadership” being the only topics guaranteed to migrate to Vogue’s main site.
Former gal-dem Politics Editor Leah Cowan recently told me how these structural decisions shape the very practice of political journalism: “If you’re being critical of capitalism or colonialism, there’s a kind of ticking clock over your head, dictating how long you’re going to be permitted to share those kinds of insurgent perspectives… particularly if you’re embedded within a big corporate media structure.”
The loss of groundbreaking reporting
Youth outlets serve as pipelines for marginalised writers, offering rigorous and supportive editing, fact-checking and mentorship that mainstream newsrooms rarely extend to young, racialised, queer or working-class journalists. Teen Vogue, for example, had become an incubator for a generation of journalists and readers, treating youth as a politically oppressed class with a stake in the world being remade. Its dismantling is a political attack on youth, with consequences for political imagination, movement-building, and who gets to stay in journalism.
Makusha describes Teen Vogue as one of the few places her writing wasn’t sanded down into something palatable for older audiences: “People who don’t have connections to the industry very much found their voice with Teen Vogue.” When these outlets vanish, so does the career ladder.
That impact goes beyond careers, though. Michaela recalls pitching a story to multiple UK outlets about Evie, an alt-right women’s magazine radicalising young women through tradwife-coded editorial, romanticisation of patriarchal gender roles, health misinformation and transphobia, only for it to be spiked. While mainstream platforms like the Guardian briefly mention the magazine in broader coverage of the “womanosphere”, Michaela stresses what’s missing: “There is a lack of focus on how it impacts young women and the way in which this information is filtered down to Gen Z.” She adds: “it’s just as important to discuss digital harms to young women in the same way we do with young men.”
“When youth media disappears, we lose a gutsy, raw, and curious form of reportage and editing that challenges the supposed inevitability of the way things are.”
Narrative flattening is the inevitable consequence of traditional outlets analysing youth culture from a distance rather than platforming young people themselves. Makusha observes, “They’re always talking about us, but they’re never involving us in the conversation.” As youth media outlets disappearing off the map, countless stories and perspectives risk being lost.
But more than that, when youth media disappears, we lose a gutsy, raw, and curious form of reportage and editing that speaks truth to power in a way that challenges the supposed inevitability of the way things are. Fascism is very much already in the room with us right now – reasserting itself in public life and consolidating mainstream hegemony through culture and media dominance.
In the words of the late David Graeber, “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” Youth publications excel at human-centred, ground-level reporting – treating young people not as PR-friendly mascots but as political subjects. Without these outlets, stories deemed too niche, risky, or unprofitable, risk disappearing from public discourse altogether.
New tactics, new media
The closures of Teen Vogue, gal-dem and other outlets are devastating, but they also call us toward a reality check. They highlight the limits of corporate or investor-backed media – pushing us to confront how profit, politics and market forces shape what gets published. But they also force us to have more political clarity about the purpose of these media projects and the impact we wish to make beyond existence or representation. As Cowan reflects: “I’ve always seen the work that I did at gal-dem as a kind of tactical piece, this is the vehicle through which we’re going to communicate our political values and political desires.”
The disappearance of any single outlet does not foreclose the possibility of radical communication – it calls for adaptation. Adaptation here doesn’t mean diluting or compromising our politics to survive; it means finding new ways to ensure that marginalised voices, youth perspectives and insurgent reporting continue to reach audiences – literally asking, “how do we meet people where they’re at?” Cowan elaborates: “There’s a danger in thinking that success in anti-fascist work is just how long your organisation can stay alive… and if it forces you to shapeshift and completely blunt the edge of your politics then I actually think that’s not useful.” The challenge lies in balancing strategic longevity with the uncompromising pursuit of political truth.
The question remains: how can media structures resist corporate capture and the consequential shaping of editorial decisions by advertisers, investors, or parent-company priorities, constraining what stories can be told and how? Independent, alternative media structures free of ads and corporate sponsorship have always existed, and they’re growing in popularity and necessity. Substack newsletters, membership models, zines and social media platforms offer alternative avenues for media production and political discourse on one’s own terms. These DIY approaches allow youth to bypass corporate media gatekeepers and experiment creatively with distribution and voice.
“The task now is to build resilient, values-driven media structures that maintain reach without being co-opted by extractive corporate logics.”
Reflecting on the tensions of SEO-driven content shaping, algorithmic suppression and advertising pressures at gal-dem, Cowan observes: “There was a real struggle between wanting to publish what mattered and wanting people to see our content… how do we match those things up?” The task now is to build resilient, values-driven media structures that maintain reach without being co-opted by extractive corporate logics.
Ultimately, capitalism breeds press censorship – the quest for profit shapes which voices and visions are allowed to survive. Teen Vogue’s embrace of the intersections of creativity and activism helped to cultivate a generation of politically literate readers and writers, and this is precisely what made the magazine a threat to corporate interests. As we all know too well by now, cultural production can simultaneously be a site of structural violence and a space for revolutionary possibility.
Conde Nast’s consolidation plans, paired with layoffs disproportionately affecting BIPOC and LGBTQ+ staff, reflect a long-standing pattern: corporate media can suppress youth-led and progressive outlets under the guise of ‘restructuring’ while using economic logics as a tool of control.
The union response underscores this reality. Condé United and the NewsGuild of New York condemned the merger, highlighting that management was “attempting to intimidate and silence our members’ advocacy for the courageous cultural and political journalism of Teen Vogue.”
The fight must continue through a multiplicity of tactics, including collective bargaining and union organising. To young journalists navigating this landscape: don’t be afraid to create what you wish already existed, experiment with DIY distribution, join a union and get organised. Even in the face of closure, the impact of spaces like Teen Vogue endures – and the work of youth-led, values-driven media is far from over.
- Isabella Kajiwara is social media lead at Skin Deep and an editor at Shado Magazine
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