Teen Vogue: Audience and Representation blog tasks

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?

We aim to educate, enlighten, and empower our audience to create a more inclusive environment; this shows that their target audience seem to be quite ambitious people. 

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.

63% of their audience are millennial's and majority of them tend to use digital media to access teen vogue. 

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

Personal relationships; they talk about topics that other publishers or other parts of the media don't tend to focus on meaning people may be able to relate more to what they read in teen vogue and they also right articles about people around the same age as their target audience sometimes.

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

The political news that teen vogue deliver would be less biased in the way that their thoughts are not influenced by the government. The articles are also structured in a form where  the target audience would be able to relate and agree with the political things being said. 

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.

The Teen Vogue Summit : June 1-3, New York City / Nov. 30 - Dec. 1, Los Angeles
Young Hollywood: Q1
Acne Awards: Q2
Back to School Awards: Q3

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?

They have topics that girls would traditionally enjoy such acne awards or young hollywood alongside political topics which women should also be able to read and enjoy in the new teen vogue. 

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

They tend to focus on this quite a bit in Teen Vogue trying to show the acceptance of gender binaries and almost 'fighting' for that equality feeling. 

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

It challenges stereotypes as their images don't use the idea of 'male gaze' or objectify women, they now use models of different colour from various ethnic backgrounds.

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

Patriarchy; a society is dominated by men who hold all the power over women, belittling women. Teen Vogue challenges this by giving women a larger platform and a bigger voice to spread awareness and make people recognise they are just as equal as men. 

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

Teen vogue portrays celebrities in a positive way as it is more of a magazine that talks about their victories and praises them rather than gossiping about them.

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?

The readers had a very similar view point to Teen Vogue as they said Donald Trump was "Gaslighting America" meaning it reached out to the audience well. 

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

Magazines and newspapers have really reinforced gender stereotypes by presenting topics such as fashion,cooking and beauty to women and things like politics, business arts and literature to men.

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

Gender bias mainly exists in magazines or media platforms that are made for and targeted specifically at one gender.

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

Jezebel’s success pushed establishment magazines to change the way they operated. Also proving that women enjoyed being spoken to an intellectual manner. 

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?

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

Feminists used to be represented as being stupid. They 'struggled to overcome the perception that they were sexless, grim bra-burners, uninterested in pleasure or aesthetics.'

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

I disagree that feminism is stereotypes as fluffy as this has clearly been changing over the years and the traditional stereotypes of a women/for a women has been changing.

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

Teen vogue readers are able to enjoy both fashion and politics, reading intellectual articles and widening their knowledge whilst also enjoying themselves. 

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?

This links to Clay Shirky's theory as he suggests that there is an end of audience as who used to be the audience now also have the chance to voice their ideas and have people listening to them due to the growth of social media.

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?

I believe more women's magazines will become hard-hitting and successful as teen vogue became more successful once they focused on serious topics which represents what females are more into these days. On top of that, teen vogue has given a voice for females to voice things that haven't otherwise been done by other media platforms or institutions.