Conde Nast, the mass media company that owns Teen Vogue, has announced massive layoffs in the Teen Vogue newsroom. Those layoffs will help about half the surviving staff get absorbed into the newsroom at Vogue.com.
The official announcement, which euphemistically said Teen Vogue is “joining” Vogue.com, was announced Nov. 3.
On social media, the demise of Teen Vogue was celebrated like the death of a movie’s bad guy in the final act. After publishing how-to articles on polyamory relationships, sex, and watching pornography, the online publication is being described as a “toxic” and “depraved” source that tried to steal the innocence of teen girls.
“I'm dancing on the grave of this poisonous mag,” Lois McLatchie Miller, a conservative British activist, wrote in an X post.
The magazine’s own writers, complaining on social media about their firings, didn’t help their cause. “Teen Vogue was one of the first places I ever got to write the kinds of more radical stories about mental health, polyamory, queerness, trans people and more,” Elly Belle, a they/them writer, wrote on X.
A second “they/them” writer, Lex McMenaamin, complained on X “their” firing from Teen Vogue means there are no more political writers on staff.
“Oh no,” one X user sarcastically replied, “who will peddle Karl Marx to the teens and assure them that sex work is real work?”
“Who now will speak out in support of domestic terrorist organizations?” a second person, linking to a 2020 article on Antifa, similarly wrote.
After he heard the news, talk show host Richard Randall said the phrase “go work, go broke” came to mind.
What happened to Conde Naste, he said, is the same thing that has happened at many other Fortune 500 companies: Executives were convinced the public wanted the “woke stuff” only to learn they were wrong.
“They are now finding out that they're out of touch,” he observed. “And they're not just a little bit out of touch. They are a lot out of touch, because they had to know when they were hiring these people what these people were like.”
