Teen Vogue: Audience and Representation blog tasks

 Teen Vogue - Audience/Representation

Audience focus

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?

The Teen Vogue mission statement is "educate, enlighten and empower their audience." This relates to their target audience as they're younger people from the ages of 18-24, the audience pleasures would be surveillance as they would be learning things by reading the article and personal identity as they can relate to some articles. 

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 for Teen Vogue would be Generation z, this means that people born between 1996 and 2010. Their demographics would be younger audiences who are into fashion, politics and lifestyle." The psychographics for Teen Vogue's audience would be aspires as they want to be apart of the change. 

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 that can be found in Teen Vogue would be diversion as they have articles about fashion and celebrity's. Another audience pleasure would be personal identity as their readers can learn and relate to campuses life and relationships.  

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

The audience is positioned to agree with their political stories as they mostly talk about liberal, left-winged topics. This way they're apart of the activism and active learning of each of these stories. 

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 encourages audiences to interact with the brand through social media as they active many platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and their website. This means that they can follow and keep up with new articles they are interested in. 

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?

The tentpoles and editorial pillars section represents women as strong and dedicated as they look into culture and identity through a feminist lens. 

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

The topic about gender identity and sexuality in Teen Vogue is represented as a healthy and normal thing as they talk about it openly so this form of education is an okay thing to talk and learn about to help their demographics usually teens about gender identity.  

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

The representations of appearance and beauty in Teen Vogue to an extent reinforce traditional stereotypes as the general idea would be that women can be political however they also accept society's standards on being fashionable. However, a refuting argument would be that Teen Vogue's audience can be an activist and care about their looks. 

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

The patriarchy is the idea that men hold the most power and women are largely excluded from many organisations due to their gender, Teen Vogue challenges this idea as they give many women and mainly women of colour a platform to share their experience and a voice to change mindsets. 

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

Teen Vogue would challenge typical representation of celebrities as they would focus on the change that specific celebrities are making and how we can learn from them. 

Teen Vogue: Factsheet Part 2

Read Media Factsheet #205 Teen Vogue Part 2 - Application of theory. You can find the Factsheet in our Factsheet archive on the Media Shared drive in school or download it here using your Greenford Google login. Answer the following questions: 

1) How does the Factsheet apply David Gauntlett's ideas about gender and identity to Teen Vogue? 

Gauntlett's idea about gender and identity can be applied to Teen Vogue as they challenge hetero-normative standards about gender and they would reinforce his idea on gender becoming more fluid. This refers to their section on sex and relationships which they have stories about safe sex and LGBTQ+ education. 

2) David Gauntlett has also written about the importance of role models. How can this be applied to the Teen Vogue CSP?

The importance of role models can be applied to Teen Vogue as they encourage viewers to look up-to successful women this means that they want their readers to be independent and learn from feminist women.   

3) bell hooks suggests that profit-seeking media industries reinforce patriarchal values and power structures. How can these ideas be applied to Teen Vogue? Try and argue both sides - that Teen Vogue both empowers women but also arguably reinforces some hegemonic gender stereotypes.

bell hooks theory can be applied to Teen Vogue as they are owned by Conde Nast which is a big capitalist conglomerate. This means they only care about the profit Teen Vogue brings in rather the good and activism they're spreading. However, the rebuttal argument they're challenging this idea as they talk about breaking the capitalist cycle and patriarchy in their own ways. 

4) List the key points on van Zoonen's gender theories in the Factsheet. How can we apply some of these ideas to Teen Vogue?

- One of these points about the media would be that bodies are often used as commodities to sell a product.

- Another point would be women often being valued for their sex appeal for men and their looks.

- Another point that Van Zoonen has made about the media would be men tend be judged by what they have accomplished.  

- The last point would be audiences are normally passive to the gender norms being reinforced.

5) Read the Greta Thunberg case study on pages 3-4. How does the Factsheet use media theories in the analysis of the special 2019 print edition of Teen Vogue? 

The media factsheet suggests Teen Vogue subverts Van Zoonen's gender ideas as they seem to care a lot about politics and challenges everything that patriarchy holds dearly. This means that they look from a positive perspective as they want their readers to learn and change.