Teen Vogue Audience and Representation

Teen Vogue: Audience and Representation blog tasks

Create a new blogpost called 'Teen Vogue Audience and Representation' and work through the following tasks to complete the audience and representation aspects of your Teen Vogue case study:

Audience

1) Analyse the Conde Nast media pack for Teen Vogue. What is the Teen Vogue mission statement and what does this tell us about the target audience and audience pleasures?

"Teen Vogue is the young persons guide to saving the world. We aim to educate, enlighten and empower our audience to create a more inclusive environment (both on- and offline) by amplifying the voices of the unheard, telling stories that normally go untold..." Overall what the mission statement says is that Teen Vogue's main focus is to represent under represented groups. 

2) What is the target audience for Teen Vogue? Use the media pack to pick out key aspects of the audience demographics. Also, consider the psychographic groups that would be attracted to Teen Vogue: make specific reference to the website design or certain articles to support your points regarding this.
Target audience:

63% Generation Z/millennials

18.5m total audience reach

Readers of Teen Vogue tend to spend $11b on fashion & beauty products

#1 reaching influential activists

Platform information:

Digital - 5.4m

Social - 13.1m

Video - 24.4m

3) What audience pleasures or gratifications can be found in Teen Vogue? Do these differ from the gratifications of traditional print-based magazines?


Diversion: Many people have hobbies to do with fashion or an interest for beauty which means they would find Teen Vogue interesting and entertaining  


Personal identity: This is a platform for people to find themselves and what they really have an interest in. Teen Vogue aims at many different target audiences and they have a goal to help people identify themselves as a person (especially teenagers).

Personal relationships: Many people can connect with people who are similar to them, this helps them create new relationships and talk about issues they all want to discuss.

4) How is the audience positioned to respond to political news stories?

Th audience is supposed to respond positively and are made to have their own view on most of the political issues. They want an active audience that has an opinion instead of a passive audience that will just take in the information. They like to report on issues that are not commonly reported on.

5) How does Teen Vogue encourage audiences to interact with the brand – and each other – on social media? The ‘tentpoles and editorial pillars’ section of the media pack may help with this question.


Teen Vogue have plenty digital platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter which encourages people to be more active. It gives people more access to them and helps them reach a larger amount of people.

Representations

1) Look again at the Conde Nast media pack for Teen Vogue. What do the ‘tentpoles and editorial pillars’ (key events and features throughout the year) suggest about the representation of women and teenage girls on teenvogue.com?

Females are portrayed very strong and positively in the 'tentpoles and editorial pillars'. They are empowered and this will encourage other young girls to feel dominant in society.

2) How are issues of gender identity and sexuality represented in Teen Vogue?

Issues are talked about in a progressive way and they are not dismissed instead they acknowledge the fact that there are underrepresented groups and they try to represent them.

3) Do representations of appearance or beauty in Teen Vogue reinforce or challenge traditional stereotypes?

They definitely challenge traditional stereotypes of appearance and beauty, an example of this is Skai Jackson's clothing in Teen Vogue and she is pictured with her Afro which is a different look to what a model was traditionally seen as. 

4) What is the patriarchy and how does Teen Vogue challenge it? Does it succeed? 

Patriarchy is definitely not reinforced in Teen Vogue, instead females are made to seem like the most empowered and dominant gender in society. Teen Vogue constantly gives women motivation and compliments their gender.

5) Does Teen Vogue reinforce or challenge typical representations of celebrity?

                              

I think that for the most part, Teen Vogue subverts typical representations of celebrity. The celebrity news that they do report tends to fit/suit the ideologies of the magazine in some way. For example, the story about transgender fashion models. 

Feature: How Teen Vogue represents the changing nature of media aimed at women

Read this Quartz feature - The true story of how Teen Vogue got mad, got woke, and began terrifying men like Donald Trump - and answer the following questions:

1) How was the Teen Vogue op-ed on Donald Trump received on social media?

Generated a lot of attention for the Teen Vogue brand as a whole because it was unexpected that a brand like Teen Vogue would speak openly about something political.

2) How have newspapers and magazines generally categorised and targeted news by gender?

Men and women generally have different interests so these interests are categorised in newspapers and magazines, politics would probably have more to do with males as it is usually male dominated however fashion and beauty has been more stereotyped to be a females hobby.

3) How is this gender bias still present in the modern media landscape?

In my opinion gender has become much more less frequent as society becomes more progressive. However there is still a small amount of gender bias in media. e.g women models dressing a certain way and beauty magazines being mostly targeted at women.

4) What impact did the alternative women’s website Jezebel have on the women’s magazine market?

This website inspired many others to add different types of articles to their magazines. This included more serious topics such as politics which would not usually be seen in a teen magazine.

5) Do you agree with the writer that female audiences can enjoy celebrity news and beauty tips alongside hard-hitting political coverage? Does this explain the recent success of Teen Vogue?

I agree with this statement seeing as this generation seems to have loads more politics to have an interest in as it could affect our future but at the same time we would like to see something we find interesting.

6) How does the writer suggest feminists used to be represented in the media?

Suggests that females used to be represented as sex objects and having an interest for soft news.

What is the more modern representation of feminism? Do you agree that this makes feminism ‘stereotyped as fluffy’?

8) What contrasting audience pleasures for Teen Vogue are suggested by the writer in the article as a whole?

Contrast between "fluffy" topics and the serious journalism covering news. Expresses the idea that women are capable of forming opinions about both sides of the news.

9) The writer suggests that this change in representation and audience pleasures for media products aimed at women has emerged from the feminist-blog movement. How can this be linked to Clay Shirky’s ‘end of audience’ theory?
Clay Shirky's end of audience talks about the idea that audiences are not as passive as they was before and they can even add what they want to the internet and answer back which is how this feminist blog can be linked to the theory because the whole point is for people to add to it.

10) Is Teen Vogue simply a product of the Trump presidency or will websites and magazines aimed at women continue to become more hard-hitting and serious in their offering to audiences?

Teen Vogue do describe themselves as 'woke' which leads me to believe that they will continue to become more hard hitting and serious of their offering to audiences however there is no doubt that the Trump presidency is a large part on Teen Vogue as he gives them a lot to talk about and report on.