OSP: 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?
--> "Their mission statement is to educate, enlighten and empower their audience." There target audience is mostly young people. For example 63% are from generation Z/ millennial. They reach up to 18.5m people internationally. The audience pleasure that can be applied is Blumler and Katz uses and gratifications theory. For example surveillance because Teen vogue provides information about everything they represent and hold value too.

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.
--> The target audience is young people betweent the age of probably 16-25.they tend to target generation Z as it raises issues to do with popo feminism. The psychographics would include middle class who aspirers as they have goals they want to achieve. They are mostly interested in celebrity content and beauty. This is because teen vogue addresses by featuring the opinion leaders of social media.

3) What audience pleasures or gratifications can be found in Teen Vogue? Do these differ from the gratifications of traditional print-based magazines?
--> The audience pleasure  include surveillance about gender fluidity as it is a progressive magazine. This is also a woke magazine as it raises awareness of social activist and movement groups such as BLM. Also personal identity so we identify what part of the social spectrum we are a part of.

4) How is the audience positioned to respond to political news stories?
-->The audience is positioned to respond by giving their own voice and political agenda because it talks about issues that are very discreet in society.


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 helps the audience to interact with the brand on social media through Instagram, twitter and Facebook. They do this by providing adverts and banners as it also had a June event that focused on activism. They also have online connectivity for the audience so that they can engage with them.

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 aim it at young teenage girls who are still trying to figure out who they are and providing them with events to give them a sense of belonging. Furthermore, this encourages young people and helps them with individuality. These things are constantly being amplified to make young females career orientated and confident with themselves.
They hold key events with @work.

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

--> This issues in the magazine are given a progressive approach as there is awareness of gender fluidity and multiculturalism.

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

--> I think that the appearances of certain celebrities reinforces the stereotypes because there are influences such as Skai Jackson. She is a young black fales and represent with an afro  is going against the norms of society.

4) What is the patriarchy and how does Teen Vogue challenge it? Does it succeed? 
-->I believe that it challenges patriarchy as this magazine is providing a voice for young girls and is set out like a 'movement'. Feminist bloggers and websites such as Rookie and liberal blog Jezebel have been credited with changing the representation of women and feminism in the digital age.

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

-->This argument goes back to Skai Jackson as she is presented with her Afro declining this western culture and really flaunting her black characteristics and this challenges typical representations of celeberities being young white females.

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?
It was well received, people enjoyed it. It gave Teen Vogue a lot of attention, as no-one expected such a hard hitting political article to come from a brand like Teen Vogue. 

2) How have newspapers and magazines generally categorised and targeted news by gender?
Newspapers and magazines target news by gender as certain sections target different audiences like having fashion, beauty, parenting and celebrity being separate from men and woman. For example, the arts literature sections that are politically hard agenda would be mostly targeted at males along with cooking being targeted at females. 

3) How is this gender bias still present in the modern media landscape?
There are more females graduating in journalism than men. However, the bias is present as men make up 65% of the political journalists and 62% of reporters covering “business and economics”.

4) What impact did the alternative women’s website Jezebel have on the women’s magazine market?
It changed the way magazines worked. It helped to create unity between women and  journalism by destroying the feminine stereotypes of women just reading about makeup and fashion. 

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?
Female audiences have and probably always will be interested in these topics. Just because we want to educate ourselves and find out information, doesn't mean we then lose interest in everything else. It is possible that women can like both and still be politically minded. 
Teen Vogue gained success because they strayed from the norm and weren't as generic as every other teen magazine. They gave the audiences a voice and an opinion. They led conversations, which is why I think they gained success in recent years. They, like everyone else in society, realised that this flawed society we live in was a huge conversation globally and they acted upon that, which was a very clever move, as it's led to loads of engagement within their brand. 

6) How does the writer suggest feminists used to be represented in the media?
Women used to be presented as people who were overtly sexualised and people who were largely interested in soft news. 

7) What is the more modern representation of feminism? Do you agree that this makes feminism ‘stereotyped as fluffy’?
The more modern representation of feminism is that we hate men or that we're preaching for something that may be impossible to achieve (critics opinion). I don't think that makes feminism 'fluffy', we're just a lot more willing to fight for what we want and we want our voice to be heard. 

8) What contrasting audience pleasures for Teen Vogue are suggested by the writer in the article as a whole?
The contrast between "fluffy" topics like beauty etc, and the "serious journalism" covering politics and news. The article expresses the idea that women are capable of forming opinions about both sides of the news, and aren't just limited to one.

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?
End of audience relates to the idea of mass communication and the concept of audiences no longer solely consuming the media, but also producing it as well. The feminist-blog movement highlights the fact that consumers can add to the content circulated in the media by projecting their own opinions.

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 think that in some respects Teen Vogue is both. Trump's presidency has definitely given them more content to cover and it led to their iconic news story which got them a lot more recognition. On the other hand, females have been becoming more influential in the media and I think that this will only continue to grow - especially with Teen Vogue spreading knowledge and keeping their audiences as conscious of the issues surrounding them.