Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye.

This is such an honor for us. I mean, it has been such a journey to oversee the transformation and evolution of teen Vogue and to be acknowledged for it, especially, by you guys, you know, in a tech tech community. It feels really new and fresh and fun for us. So we're really, we're really excited to be in DC.

We so teen Vogue has, I guess, traditionally been, as you said, a fashion and beauty title and a fashion beauty publication. Obviously, it was started by Anna Wintour back in the day day, fourteen years ago. Right? It's fourteen years. And so, ultimately, I let I was an assistant at Teen Vogue. I was a digital editor at Teen Vogue, and I left. And I went to Refinery twenty nine. And not even seven months into my job there, the editor in chief of Teen Vogue at the time, Amy Astley, called me and and basically said, I think I've let you cook long enough. It's time to come home. And so I came home, and, I got to, basically be leading the website as the digital editorial director. The question was, how do you grow the website? So at that time, it was around 2,000,000 unique visitors. They were pretty much exclusively covering fashion, beauty, and entertainment. And so when you are looking at a product and how to grow it, obviously, you're looking at new opportunity for the white space for how you grow. And so for me, I saw clear white space in the wellness arena, which meant sexual health, reproductive rights, mental health and nutrition, things that, FYI, teenage teenagers and teenage girls in particular are going through on a daily basis and need our help and guidance with, and also politics and the news cycle. So I saw a lot of young people very engaged with the Black Lives Matter movement. And in fact, when I first started, the Freddie Gray case was happening in Baltimore. And so we kind of jumped into that and we tried it. To be honest, this was a slow build for us. It was not an instant or overnight success. I hired a a politics editor, a news editor at the time who was from the Wall Street Journal, and she would come into my office often to say, this is so frustrating because Kylie Jenner can cut her hair and it will be, you know, a 100,000 people will come to the story. But I write about Freddie Gray and, like, 500 people come to the story. Why is this happening? And this doesn't feel right to me. I think that we should shift our strategy. But I said no. So, you know, I was very stubborn about it because I think for our audience what we knew and what we knew to be true is that you have to build it and then they will come. Right? You have to really prove that you're putting your stake in the ground. Two years later, teamvogue.com has grown almost 250% from 2,000,000 unique visitors to 10.7 as of as of March. And, we are really excited about that growth, but we're even more excited that that growth has come from areas where people did not think that we would ever enter from content that we would people thought we would never produce. Well, I'm reading here, from your great PR folks that politics is right now or for the past three months has beaten entertainment in terms of verticals that you're on team Vogue. Yes. That's correct. So Impressive. It used to be like Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, The Weeknd, whatever happened in celebrity land dominated, the traffic. And our entertainment editor, you know, who's been so she's been great because she's very pleased to be usurped by our politics team as as they have, as they've kind of claimed the throne for now. But, you know, we are at a fever pitch of political interest right now, and we're hoping that that is, you know, maintained. We're hoping that young people stay civically engaged. And I'm looking at our Facebook Live audience now,

I think what's interesting is, teen Vogue was always a great fashion place and a great photography and as a magazine, really recognized. And I have to say even myself when Phil started and started to, you know, do certain stories online, launching wellness, I was like, wait, like, at 17 Vogue, we're about like pretty girl in capri, wearing a dress and being happy, and we're about like, you know. And I think the best part of it all and the part that aligned a little bit is when I started, which was about five or six years ago just and the website was very small, just the magazine. I wanted to bring back an honesty and a realness to the girl. So and it's purely visual but, like, the little stuff that I did was turn down the makeup. Let's not let's show the girls out there and, like, you know, more honest photography and stuff like that. And, the best thing I think that happened with all of this besides the growth and the engagement is actually, talking to to the girls directly. And there's not a the best story of it all is the the next generation is so interesting, and they're so interested, and they love, like, so many different things, so it opened for me a whole other area, to work with, not only in a medium way with, like, you know, video and not just, like, print photos, but, really entering new world and treating fashion differently and,

For me, there's a few. Purely, digitally, I think we need to ask a native American girl was Oh, that was gorgeous. This one where, Gus Fields always had amazing article, but I think it's the moment where, actually, my team and what we do help improve it and, switch everyone minds as well on what can be done, and it can be beautiful, and see the girl being happy, and see, all that. And that came as well after a story that we actually had done, in book and online that did really well. That was cultural appreciation, which was a really, really interesting story, and I loved how it worked on a lot of different areas. I love how we were, you know, at designer clothes and a real girl that was a Native American talking about our culture. And photographically, it was interesting. Video was interesting. It was, I think, one of the first one that trended on Twitter, if I'm correct. And that was just, like so all those stories are really moment that,

I would have to say, I think one of the coolest things about the collaboration between Marie's team and the digital team has been that Marie is her legacy and her roots are in are in obviously magazine media. Right? And so Marie has contacts and the ability to call upon the industry's best photographers, hairstylist, makeup artists, and invite them to a set where all of a sudden it's like, it's about real girls. It's about Native American girls. This story is about cultural appropriation. We're gonna educate you about what appropriation means and representation, and this is why we're here. And has really rallied her whole sector of the industry, of the fashion industry to pay attention to the deeper meanings behind the shoots that we're doing. And that has created a real ripple effect within, you know, the creative and the fashion industry that that she kind of navigates. And that's been incredible because it's easy to do these stories, especially as a digital property. It's way easier for the digital property to be more progressive and more outlandish with the kinds of content we cover than the print product. But Marie helped bring it, and, obviously, in in her collaboration with Elaine, our print editor, helped really bring it full circle, which was which was great. But, anyways, I there are so many things things that that we are so proud of. And the Native American Girl is also a highlight for me, but our wellness editor last year launched this, series called Not Your Fault. And it was in April because April is National Sexual Assault Awareness Month. And so we had a video series called Guys Read which was just nominated for an ASME award. ASME is the American Society of Magazine editors. Thank you. Where we invited men to read stories that were written by sexual assault survivors about their assaults. And, basically, these two men sit down, they listen to each other, they listen to the stories and then they reflect together about what they just read. And in, the last video, one of the readers realizes that he was reading the story of the man he's sitting across from and it was a man who sexually assaulted. So this story, you know, this video series, I I don't wanna say fully encompassed, but the closest that we really could have come to, acknowledging all different gender identities, sexual orientations, and, you know, walks of life. It was a really moving and really powerful series. And this year, Joe Biden, actually his people reached out to our wellness editor and said we would love for Joe to chat with you because of your work in the sexual assault space, and we particularly want you to interview him. And so that interview just went live on the site, this week, and, it it has to be a highlight of teen Vogue history. It is, an amazing piece. That's great. That's really amazing.

I mean, I think the whole shift came from what was happening online. What do you make how do you make the magazine and the print feel special? How do you make, you know, digital feel special? Where we wanted to, you know, really create special issues that are different format and keepsake and really have the time to tell all the story we wanna tell in a bigger way, online that goes with, you know, staff budgets and all that stuff. And that's something that really came from Phil, Elaine, and myself discussing it, and we all felt very strongly about it. I think it really makes sense. I think it couldn't really have happened before. What Phil was saying even about sorry, my side of the industry and the photographers and the stylists, Now they wanna work for online. Now they are the one calling. We would have done that a year ago. For me, it wouldn't have been as interesting. Oh, interesting. And I wouldn't have been able to tell as much all those stories. And there is something about print and it's something about having a, you know, more of a keepsake magazine, which a lot of print editions are saying. But when you're doing a four years and it's and the volume and they're sold out completely differently than the magazine Mhmm. Are usually yeah. You don't have, like, a trend page or stuff that don't matter. It's it's, you know, it has shifted as well as what as Phil has brought up to online was brought into print. So

I think it's to get the best of both worlds and to do the job well. That's great. And I would just add that because of the you know, when Lauren's piece went viral, Lauren Duca, if you don't know of her background, wrote a op ed called Donald Trump is Gaslighting America. Dan Rather shared it. She was on CNN, MSNBC, and, you know, she's she's an incredible writer. We noticed our consumer marketing department emailing us saying, what happened you guys? The print subscriptions are going through the roof. People were going to our website and subscribing to the magazine. Tvogue is still recognized as a magazine. And so in order to show support, they, you know, we found that our audience and mothers and teachers and even people on Twitter who were saying the first 10 teenagers to like my tweet, I'm gonna buy them a subscription to teen Vogue. All of these people were coming out of the road work to show support for good journalism, and they wanted to do so by subscribing to our magazine. And it's a really, really special product. And it's also bigger now, so we were like a kind of a pocket sized digest before, and it was really cute. But then, you know, Elaine, our printer always likes to say we grew up literally by, you know, expanding the the height of of the magazine too. So it stands out more at newsstands, and we do three covers. We did three covers for volume one, and it and it feels really special and dynamic.

They should know that young women deeply care about technology and that they deserve to be invited to the table about technology. And we read a lot of stories, and our audience is exposed to a lot of stories about, gender disparity in Silicon Valley and also gender pain equality. And that can be disheartening. But we also know that young women are succeeding in college at higher rates right now, and they're very qualified employees. And they're going to be also very vocal employees and a very vocal generation. And so we're really excited to see how women are going to transform the technology industry. And, through, you know, various initiatives that we have going on this year with Technovation, with Made with Code, with, you know, with the worldwide developers conference that Apple is doing. We're really hoping that our readers can see us, as a space for, for women in STEM and for getting more involved in technology. But we do need the tech industry also to to meet us halfway and show show us that they're showing up for women too.

She she never says that to me. Oh. Obviously not.