The Shuttering of “Teen Vogue” and the Silencing of Progressive Voices

Once I realized that Teen Vogue had been absorbed into Vogue and its politics group had been laid off, it felt like one other intestine punch in a time of infinite dangerous information. For almost 10 years, Teen Vogue was an inconceivable house for among the sharpest justice journalism within the nation. Whereas different shops chased clicks or softened language, Teen Vogue printed incisive essays on prisons, abortion criminalization, police violence, and democracy itself. Its writers didn’t simply analyze techniques of inequality and injustice—they handed the microphone to those that lived them first hand.

Teen Vogue’s dissolution alerts a extra troubling shift: the quiet disappearance of knowledgeable group voices from mainstream media and, extra broadly, the silencing of those that problem the dominant fear-mongering narratives that consolidate help for right-wing political agendas. It’s no coincidence that this silencing is unfolding alongside a broader assault on labor itself—evident in newsroom union fights like Condé Nast’s and a weakened National Labor Relations Board. These assaults are central to how authoritarian forces consolidate energy and exert management.

As a public defender for almost a decade in Brooklyn, I spent lengthy days in crowded courtrooms the place lives had been being determined in minutes, typically with no viewers, no cameras, and little understanding from the skin world. What struck me most was what number of sensible voices had been being ignored: the folks residing via injustice day-after-day, the defenders witnessing the system’s failures up shut, and the advocates and organizers making an attempt to rework it. That frustration is what led me to discovered Zealous, an initiative working to assist these closest to injustice inform their very own tales and shift public understanding of what security, well being, and justice actually require.

Teen Vogue shortly turned the outlet that introduced that imaginative and prescient to life. Zealous has partnered with Teen Vogue on dozens of items that taught readers one thing uncommon in mainstream media—how justice truly works, and for whom.

These tales chronicled the final decade of American disaster and resistance: from 2018’s exposé of Louisiana’s collapsing public-defense system—the place attorneys described “triaging human lives”—to essays on the battle in opposition to the “superpredator” fable and the criminalization of trauma survivors. Through the Covid-19 pandemic, Teen Vogue and Zealous partnered to publish firsthand accounts from inside Cook County Jail, one of many nation’s deadliest outbreaks. Within the wake of the George Floyd rebellion, we collaborated on protection explaining how “copaganda” shapes what the general public believes about security. And when the Supreme Court docket overturned Roe v. Wade, collectively we linked the dots between reproductive rights and criminal punishment.

In whole, we partnered on almost 30 articles and video projects that traced a residing historical past: the public-defense disaster, mass incarceration, pandemic neglect, protest repression, abortion criminalization, and the rise of abolitionist creativeness. These articles kind a timeline of how a era realized to query punishment itself. They had been additionally coaching grounds for readers—many encountering these points for the primary time—displaying what crucial media ought to seem like: unafraid, intersectional, rigorous.

That Teen Vogue of all shops turned a pillar of significant justice reporting was no accident. Its editors understood that feminism with out freedom is hole. They handled youth not as shoppers however as individuals in democracy. And so they modeled what actual editorial bravery seems to be like: commissioning incarcerated writers and grassroots advocates, insisting on trauma-informed storytelling, and publishing work that demanded higher from the system—and from us.

The disappearance of that platform is greater than one newsroom. It alerts the sluggish collapse of areas prepared to publish the reality about hurt and therapeutic in America. Newsrooms are shrinking. Foundations are retreating. And the journalists most fluent in justice—typically ladies, gender-fluid, and folks of shade—are losing their jobs first. This contraction just isn’t impartial; it is political. When the shops prepared to publish abolitionists, public defenders, and survivors vanish, public understanding narrows. Democracy weakens.

Teen Vogue’s work was initially pushed by a mission to coach and empower younger ladies and ladies. But over time it reached far past that: Its reporting drew in most people, lecturers, lawmakers, and cultural leaders. It formed debate and knowledgeable coverage. The group’s attain and affect proved that critical, justice-oriented journalism may thrive in sudden locations—and that youth media may change the world.

I don’t know if Condé Nast will reverse course. I hope it does. However whether or not or not Teen Vogue survives, the motion for reality should discover new houses. We’d like editors who see experience in lived expertise, and we’d like funders who acknowledge that justice journalism is foundational to democracy. However we additionally want readers to maintain searching for out the views Teen Vogue elevated—to withstand the concept that cable commentators or political pundits are our solely specialists.

The true truth-tellers are nonetheless on the market: the organizers, survivors, defenders, and straight impacted individuals who perceive what security and justice demand. Our democracy depends upon whether or not we select to maintain listening to them.