"Condé is reducing the frequencies of most of its titles and will shutter Teen Vogue in print", WWD reported earlier this month. When I first read the news, I was in complete shock. When I saw that nobody else had even heard the news, I knew magazines truly were dead. Our world is changing once again.
What is Teen Vogue? Teen Vogue is Vogue's sister publication, targeted towards teenage girls. In 2004, Teen Vogue joined the trend of other magazines to create a version of themselves targeted towards a younger audience. Teen Vogue, like most magazines, has their online publication as well, which will soon be their only existence in the world.
The death of Teen Vogue print is essentially beginning the grave digging for magazines as a whole. With only two printed teen audience bases left (Seventeen and J-14), the magazine industry is about to be as ancient as flip phones.
Here's why.
Let's look at this from a logical perspective. How does one get into the habit of actually reading a magazine? You grow up reading them. If you don't grow up reading them and find your main source of news from the internet, what will draw you to picking up a magazine in the grocery store?
I suppose I was the last generation to have magazines lying across their bed during sleepovers. I had posters of The Jonas Brothers and sat around with my friends at lunch to take all the quizzes in each issue. It was a social norm and a fairly inexpensive hobby.
This isn't the first sighting of the young adult, teen audience losing interest in magazines.
Elle Girl stopped their print in 2006. CosmoGirl ended their teen magazine in 2009 after only one year of publishing. Even TeenBeat, who has been around since 1967 had their final issue in 2007.
Teen Vogue has been in dangerous waters for a while and it's probably surprising they have made it as long as they did. With recent magazine sales dropping and their publisher, Condé Nast's budget cuts, the life of Teen Vogue's print was destined to end. That doesn't mean we can't be sad about it for a moment.
As someone who aspires to a career in writing, news like this reminds me that we are preparing for a job we know nothing about anymore. Print magazines as a whole could be gone in the next couple of years, causing many people to lose their jobs and their voices. Teen Vogue has been in the press recently for their material, they were tailoring to a new audience and people were listening.
They were touching on topics that young adult magazines hadn't touched on before. It wasn't about crushes and lipsticks anymore. Teen Vogue was promoting powerful young woman, and I hope they still do. Teen Vogue is fresh and cool. It doesn't feel like a sleepover magazine anymore. It's sharp, edgy and not afraid to speak its mind, just like the modern girl.
I don't think Teen Vogue is ready to throw in the towel yet and give up all they accomplished. They will simply have to work with what they've proved they're good at, which is tailoring their material to a new audience. In this case, that audience is online, behind computer screens and phones in their pockets.
Teen Vogue has a strong and growing online presence. Their YouTube channel expresses their current voice with a mix of cute humorous pieces like Maddie Ziegler impersonating different celebrities, women empowerment pieces such as Ashley Judd standing up to Harvey Weinstein and inspirational pieces such as seeing what it's like to be a professional ballerina.
I browsed the Teen Vogue website for a few minutes, happy to see their writing style is still visible but sad to see the platform it must now be presented on.
There's a raw lux about a magazine compared to an online journal. Perhaps because there are so many of them. Perhaps because I didn't grow up relying on them for news and entertainment. I'm sure the creative content creators, editors, and directors at Teen Vogue have a plan to innovate themselves for readers of generations to come.
As for writers, prepare for the future and buckle your seatbelt. A job today could die tomorrow. You could enter a career you didn't know existed on a platform still being born. Our media is changing before our eyes and if you blink, you could miss it.
