Quote:The media class certainly reads it, or at least that’s what they claim. Gen X writers from the Financial Times applaud their “kick-ass” news coverage. Even this publication praised the outlet, which includes such serious-minded reporting as “Teens Officially Read Way More Than Adults Do, So There” (well, yeah, they’re in school) and “Makeup Tips for Girls with Glasses and Freckles” (which is not, as I had hoped, the single sentence “Put the makeup on your face”). The latter piece is replete with product placement, including a $700 pair of vintage Cardin spectacles, but this has not shaken the faith of lefty writers that a decidedly woke shift in editorial direction represents a serious or at least positive trend in publishing for young readers — and, sure, maybe a few of their zoomer-curious elders.Sounds familiar...
Quote:which reported 8,341,000 unique visitors to Teen Vogue’s website in May 2017. The “Trump Bump” was certainly good to them, with online readership tripling in 2016 after they started pumping socially progressive and political soapboxing content to their roster, followed by a steep plummet to 4,476,000 one year later.Bet it's dropped more and more since then.
Quote:Criticisms of Teen Vogue don’t come exclusively from the Right. Clio Chang of the Columbia Journalism Review described the magazine’s portrayal of girls as “frequently flattened into either Greta Thunberg–like saviors or overly woke children who need to be saved.” And Chang zeroes in on what the Examiner misses: Teen Vogue’s editorial remit is not about reaching out to girls so much as portraying a parody of them, documentary-like, to their curious, envious elders.
While the exact numbers are disputable, one thing is certainly clear: far more adults — mostly millennials, in fact, even as we drift into middle age — are reading the teen magazine touting itself as “the young person’s guide to conquering (and saving) the world” than teens.
It would be tempting to pin this on an infantilizing women’s mediascape, but men, too, are drinking deep of the teen (the latest numbers show that 30 percent of Teen Vogue‘s readership are men, and it’s not clear if the publisher’s insistence that their readership is “genderless” is a nod to gender diversity or to queer politics).
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