Media Audiences
Primary audience is teen and young adults.
Teens would find small quantities of text, with large pictures, and simple headings, easy to understand.
Articles reflect teenage nature of many audiences. For example, Andrew Tate has made a big impact on young teens and has influenced them to act differently towards women. On the political post of Teen Vogue, they published ‘Andrew Tate and the “Manosphere” Show How Far Hating Women Can Get You’. This post talks about how Andrew Tate’s popularity is a sign of feminism under attack. There is also another post relevant to Andrew Tate where he is detained on Human Trafficking Charges.
These articles also give multiple references to TV shows about teen characters, e.g. Ginny and Georgia as it recently released a new season, which helps to engage teen audiences.
In some articles the use of slang and abbreviations indicate they are targeting young audiences as this is more engaging than formal words.
The references to other media texts are focused on female centred products, suggesting a mostly female audience, e.g. ‘original mean girls Amanda Seyfried is “very open” to joining “mean girl: The musical” movie.’ The caption says ‘please’ suggesting that as well as teenage audiences that its mainly female audiences in this online magazine.
These articles target women by rackling issues such as feminism, rights, sexual assault and oppression, such as the talk about Andrew Tate where he has been accused of misogyny, sexual assault and rape.
Although they target a lot of the female audience they also target trans or non binary audiences, suggesting that the gender of the target audience is not simple and is more diverse. For example, ‘FIFA banned players LGBTQ + solidarity symbols at the world cup’, however many European teams walked back to wear rainbow armbands during the global soccer competition on November 23, 2022. This allows the gender audience to be quite broad.
You can argue that teen vogue allows older audience to interact with their media as they have a Facebook page with over 5 million followers and many adults use Facebook rather than younger audiences. This illustrates how adult audiences may be drawn to a site which offers the more liberal and diverse and political content that many online and print magazines aimed at adults fail to offer.
In teen vogue there is a claim of diverse ethnic audience that is targeted by featuring articles about issues such as racism, oppression, culture, etc. For example, ‘myths about Muslim Women Debunked’ where it can influence a large amount of content about people from minority ethnic backgrounds, that would engage a similar audience who are often used to being under or mis represented in the media.
Another example is that these articles can offer informative and educational content about a variety of political issues and events such as ‘ the climate emergencies we’re not playing attention to.
To interact with their audience and to reach out to more people they post on a bunch of social media such as Instagram, Facebook, twitter, which helps to engage active audiences.
Media Representation
This magazine has the title Teen Vogue so it clearly is aimed at young audiences. The website shows quite stereotypical interests for teenagers so there is a lot of interest in popular culture, movie, singers, etc.
However, there is a challenge of representation towards young people as they talk a lot about politics, where they are being educated and curious about the world. For example, their is a post about “should your employer be able to stop you from getting a new job” where the site represent young people in positions power, as activists demanding social change. This can also present how people are being successful and achieving, having the potential to be powerful people.
Older adults can also be represented in a more negative light. For example as failed politicians, racists, unsuccessful, etc. In the website we can see a guy called George Santos who apparently lied about his real identity and that he was a fraud at age 19 all the way to his 30’s. This allows you audiences to portray themselves as more positive and older audiences as negative people.
There are many other online magazines that often show women in quite sexualised or domestic ways. The focus in those magazines is often on beauty and bodies. Teen vogue’s pages do not seem to focus on body shape, dating, dieting, etc. Very few women are sexualised on the site. Therefore, this suggests women as being less sexualised and more independent and non reliant on others. For example, Miley Cyrus who is back with the self love anthem of 2023 can be shown as important, powerful, successful, inspirational, etc.
Teen vogue doesn’t avoid important information to do with women such as misogyny or depression. They talk about women’s rights or things that are normal that happen to women, such as having a period, the need for feminism, or sexual harassment. Women are represented as having multiple issues to face. This allows the website o be realistic rather then idealised.
Bells hooks can be linked into the online magazine as they seem to be feminist and fighting against patriarchal oppression and encouraging a particular female audience to recognise the misogyny and the patriarch and to fight back against those issues. The site pays tribute to bell hooks after her death in 2021 whish shows that they tendered to agree with her ideas about how women and in particular black women, are typically represented. They called her the black feminist artist where she shaped a generation of black feminists.
David Gauntlet can be linked with teen vogue as gender is represented in a diverse “non binary” way, with pages showing multiple types of identity. They show a broad look on how female present themselves where it is hair, or different style, or type of gender they see themselves, or behaving in different ways, so there is quite a diverse rage of identities.
The site is primarily aimed at young women and men are often represented in less favourable ways. Men are often represented as being linked to violence, misogyny, the patriarchy like Andrew Tate. However you can argue that there are men who can be seen in a more positive way in general, this usually occurs to attract the younger audience.
The site represents LGBTQ+ people, including issues they face and struggles they have. In addition the representation of LGBTQ+ people are very positive and diverse.
Main mainstream media texts sometimes fail to embrace black hair, and it is often simply straightened or not featured at all. The website shows love and support to them and makes sure they are represented equally as everyone else.
The website draws attention to the post colonialism era and the impact it had and still is having on people from different ethnic backgrounds. The site clearly represents the issues of white privilege.
Media Industry
It is an American print magazine where a range of other international versions grew from that, however it has been declining rapidly over the years and brands started reducing the advertising as they were buying in print magazines, resulting in massive revenue drops. Teen vogue ceased being a print magazine and in 2017 they have become an online only site. This means they can still keep uploading on online until they reach their target audience, this is also useful as this reduces their overheads like printing and distribution costs.
The magazine is made by Conde Nast. They are a large and global conglomerate. They first begun as a spin off magazine to their existing vogue magazine. It was created to try to engage younger readers and push them towards the vogue brand which helped to increase profit.
Conde Nast is an even larger conglomerate as they are owned by advance publications. They are massive and global and have been around over 100 years. Teen vogue is just one of multiple print and online brands created by Conde Nast.
Conde Nast is diversified working within entertainment, technology, advertising, retail, restaurants, etc. This help[s to reduce risk by adding more opportunities for revenue. The current editor in Chief is Versha Sharma of Indian immigrants, she is a successful political writer, who could impact upon the content she wants in the magazine, as well as the way she wants articles to tackle certain issues.
Since becoming an online magazine, teen vogue have grown rapidly, more recent figures since filming, suggest online visitors are about 8 million a month.
The political ideologies of Teen vogue are evident in their articles which although are factual are mostly anti republican / Trump and pro Democratic.
Teen vogue has the image that they like to push boundaries where they are seen as more rebellious and controversial opinions and values, which makes it unique. For example, people who worked in sex work professions, articles about abortions, which could be shocking.
Social media is very popular for teen vogue and reflects the rising trend of converged online technologies. This is more engaging for a modern audience online. The use of social media is to push traffic to their website as this will help them to increase their advertising revenue.
Teen vogue also promote across a wide range of social media to both engage audiences and earn further revenue through monetisation. A lot of videos online, which helps them earn more money, they had a virtual online event during lockdown which helped to keep audiences visiting the site. To target more audiences they have snapchat as a lot of young audiences have the app, the posts usually offer interactive content such as polls and quizzes.
Sometimes companies have to self regulate in order to maintain their reputations. For example, in Teen vogue they had a homophobic and racist by previous editor in Chief Alexi McCammond, who was discovered to tweet homophobic and racist content on twitter. A lot of audiences were quite negative about this and Teen Vogue were forced to take action to maintain the reputation of their company.