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Glitter polish & politics

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I’ve been hearing about Teen Vogue’s foray into politics for a while now and wondering what was behind the change.

“I think about a year and a half ago I’d say, we all kind of came around the table and said, we have to mean more to our girls. Why are we here today?,” Welteroth told NPR’s All Things Considered in an interview last week.

“In one of my interviews, one of the questions was, how do you grow Teen Vogue from 2 million to 10 million a month? And [adding politics to the mix] was largely the answer,” added Picardi.

Serving the reader and increasing readership? What madness is this?

Duca’s “scorched earth op-ed,” published December 10 on TeenVogue.com, was a watershed moment for the brand’s political pivot. The article was retweeted tens of thousands of times, reaching over one-million readers and becoming Teen Vogue’s most-read story of 2016, ahead of this September piece, a how-to on applying glitter nail polish.

Aha, the old glitter polish/politics switcheroo. Lure them in with beauty tips and then ambush the unsuspecting reader with an article about sexism in politics. Everyone knows that people – especially teen people – don’t want to read things like this

Trump won the Presidency by gas light. His rise to power has awakened a force of bigotry by condoning and encouraging hatred, but also by normalizing deception. Civil rights are now on trial, though before we can fight to reassert the march toward equality, we must regain control of the truth. If that seems melodramatic, I would encourage you to dump a bucket of ice over your head while listening to “Duel of the Fates.” Donald Trump is our President now; it’s time to wake up.

They want to hear that while some say Trump’s behavior is reminiscent of that exhibited by people who some call white supremacists, others say that he is merely behaving in the unorthodox manner that has endeared him to millions of Americans who felt he embodied their ideals.

It’s clear that Teen Vogue has identified political content as a powerful means of ushering young females from its print magazine to its digital properties — traffic to TeenVogue.com is up 145 percent this year, according to data from ComScore. As mass media prepares for 2017 and a new administration in the White House, and legacy publishers continually look for ways to compete with digital millennial powerhouses like Buzzfeed, Vice, and Refinery29, expect other teen-focused titles to follow suit.

Maybe Tiger Beat will start churning out investigative articles and we’ll have to call it Tiger Beat on the Hudson to distinguish if from Tiger Beat on the Potomac.

And maybe outlets like the Times (NY, LA) and the Washington Post will follow their lead to position themselves as the natural next step for kids are growing out of teen mags (without the fucked up body image b.s. of the one or the George Will of the other). But probably not.

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