A conversation with Teen Vogue editor Versha Sharma.

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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT LANE PRESS

If Teen Vogue’s editorial still surprises you, it might be time to admit that this says more about you than it does about Teen Vogue. And also, perhaps, that you haven’t been paying attention.

Teen Vogue is not the first magazine aimed at “the young” of course, and it’s not the first one to address multiple issues. But…Teen Vogue is the first, perhaps, to make a certain kind of noise.

Since well before the Trump presidency, but certainly turbocharged during it, Teen Vogue has mixed tips on fashion and beauty, profiles about the latest girl groups from Korea, and the scoop on the stars of Bridgerton, with political analysis and opinion, stories about identity and social justice, and an election primmer that is maybe one of the most thorough you’ll find anywhere.

Versha Sharma has been editor since 2021 and has not only maintained all the pillars that make up Teen Vogue but enhanced them. She came to Teen Vogue from overtly political media like Talking Points Memo, NowThis, Vocativ, and MSNBC. And she says she’s landed her dream job.

Sharma and her team are unabashed and unapologetic about what they do—and know that they are serving a large community of very active young women (65% of the readership) who follow the brand on every social channel imaginable, visit the website by the millions, and attend Teen Vogue Summits—in person!—to listen to their favorite influencers, singers, entrepreneurs, actors and activists talk shop.

Sharma feels like the luckiest editor in the industry. But one thing is missing: paper. Teen Vogue discontinued its print edition more than seven years ago. Her new dream? Convincing her bosses at Condé Nast to bring it back.

“There is still very much a lack of taking young people seriously. And then also leaving room for the idea that we all contain multitudes.”

Arjun Basu: Tell us how you got here. Tell us about your background until you landed this job.

Versha Sharma: So I’ve been working in digital journalism in New York for almost 15 years now. I was a political science major in college, and worked on a couple of political campaigns right out of college. Quickly realized that I wanted to be on the journalism side more than the actual politics side. And so I got an unpaid internship—it was still the days of unpaid ones—at Talking Points Memo in 2009. And that was the start of my journalism career.

I ended up staying at TPM for three years and I cycled through a variety of positions. I feel like I learned all aspects of the publishing and digital media business at that time. Then I hopped over to vocative, which was an international news startup for a time, did a short stint at MSNBC covering the 2012 election, and then landed at NowThis.

Which is really, I feel like, obviously has the strongest connection to where I am today. Because I ended up there for seven years and really helped build it from scratch. And our mission was always news for young people by young people, which feels very similar to Teen Vogue’s mission as well.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, I mean, when you just look at it a little and we’ll get to the condescending, patronizing, surprise, Teen Vogue messaging that especially went out I guess during the first Trump era. But talking to youth, in terms of media, it’s always been around. I just don’t think it’s been covered properly, in a way. So how did this job come about?

Versha Sharma: So it was seven years at NowThis, it was just after the 2020 election, and I was already feeling like I wanted to find my next thing and move on. And a friend actually told me that the previous EIC, Lindsey Peoples Wagner was leaving for The Cut. I didn’t know that at the time. And she encouraged me to apply.

And I applied. I thought that it was a long shot. This is a dream job. I’ve really admired previous EICs, like you already mentioned the Trump era, the first one Elaine Welteroth being the iconic editor-in-chief that she was of Teen Vogue. Such an inspiration to black and brown girls everywhere, I think, myself included.

I did think it was a long shot. I did think it was a dream job but I was able to get through with some internal recommendations in the building through to the interview process and it went from there.

Arjun Basu: So you’ve been there three or four years now.

Versha Sharma: Yes. Coming up on three years.

Arjun Basu: So I think, when I look at something like Teen Vogue, being an ex-editor myself, I always think about the editorial meeting where, you know, someone’s going to talk about Bridgerton—you did that cover recently—and then also, about “war is going on in the world” or the election coming up. How does that editorial meeting work? Are there things like, “Oh yeah, girl groups,” and then “makeup tips,” and then “Biden?” How does that work?

Versha Sharma: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a great question. It is a little bit of everything. And going back to what you already mentioned about how media and publishers talk to young people, I think there is still very much a lack of taking young people seriously. And then also leaving room for the idea that we all contain multitudes, right?

Like we can all be interested in multiple things at once. We can care about the latest fashion and beauty trends on TikTok. And we can also care about what the latest Biden administration policy is about Israel and Palestine. And we do. And the young people certainly do. And so I want Teen Vogue to continue to reflect that.

And I do think it’s reflected in our staff and it’s reflected in our staff meetings. The Bridgerton cover story is, I think, a really interesting example because Nicola Coughlin, the lead actress on Bridgerton this season, I find her really fascinating for a lot of reasons. She’s a very talented actress with a budding career on the rise. She’s also incredibly vocal and outspoken about advocating for humanitarian relief in Palestine.

And that, honestly, is the perfect Teen Vogue cover person or star or talent to me. It’s somebody who embodies all of those things. She’s leading the culture. She’s also leading cultural conversation. She’s unafraid to be outspoken. And those are the kinds of people that the Teen Vogue audience looks up to.

Arjun Basu: I don’t think the editors of Esquire or GQ are asked that question. And they do basically the same thing, just for a different audience, and a different gender, for the most part. But Esquire is where you learn whether the socks match the pants or the shoes, and also where you get really fluffy celebrity profiles, but also where you get really hard hitting pieces of journalism, and I don’t think anyone’s ever asked about how you do it.

Versha Sharma: Yeah, that’s true. And I think I’ll give credit to Vogue as well. I think Vogue has also reflected that evolution in recent years where obviously they are the fashion Bible, the fashion go-to magazine. And yes, they run fluff pieces, but they’ve also run some really interesting and insightful essays, for example, about, like, body inclusivity in the fashion industry.

And Teen Vogue has also been doing that since the very beginning. I’ve got old magazine covers lining the walls of my office. And though Teen Vogue of the last eight to ten years gets a lot of credit for being more modern and more progressive, it’s actually been the case since the beginning.

I look at this old Teen Vogue cover from the first year with Gwen Stefani and it talks about how curvy girls are changing Hollywood’s stick thin standard. There’s another one with Beyonce and it talks about how Vanessa Carlton shares her struggle with depression. And I do feel like Amy Astley, the founding editor in chief of Teen Vogue, who’s now the global director of Architectural Digest, doesn’t get enough credit for the fact that she started that legacy of Teen Vogue taking serious topics seriously, while also giving you the best tips for party dresses, or whatever it might be.

**Sharma, far left, and guests at a 92 Street Y event.**

Arjun Basu: I think what really stands out about Teen Vogue is it never underestimates an audience that a lot of people underestimate. That you really speak to them and that, yeah, they, everyone contains multitudes and it’s not easy being a young girl in our world. We think of magazines as the “original influencers” in many ways, and when I think of Teen Vogue, I use that word as well. And maybe seems almost superfluous or ironic because you guys influence the influencers as well.

Versha Sharma: Yeah,

Arjun Basu: You hold a very special place, I think, in the world.

Versha Sharma: Yeah, I think a lot of today’s influencers are certainly people who grew up subscribing, or with the print edition of Teen Vogue. We get that a lot from people that we interview or that we do photo shoots with. And it’s interesting—we’ve just had a style editorial meeting, actually, that I feel like you would have liked to listen in on where we had an extensive discussion about what is an influencer today in 2024? What does that look like? What are the conversations?

It is radically different from even just a couple of years ago. So there are these, like, interesting conversations, especially with the way that our distribution channels change, seemingly month by month now. Whether it is new platforms emerging and becoming dominant—TikTok—or Google and Meta implementing algorithm changes that just, like, completely tanks our traffic, right?

That’s one of the challenges that we, and I think all publishers, are dealing with right now.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. I was going to ask about that because I read somewhere that there was a decision made before you got there that too much content is exactly that: too much content. Is there a line? What is your line? There’s no print version, obviously. So you’re dealing with things 24/7. How quickly do things come out or how often, or is there a daily limit, for example?

Versha Sharma: Yeah. There’s not really a limit. We do follow the news cycle and we know what our audience is interested in and who they’re interested in. So that can change on a given day, depending on what the news is. But we do have our daily news pieces, blogs, as we refer to them sometimes. And then we have our longer term features that may take days, weeks, or even months in some cases that we work on and certainly our covers.

We are no longer print, but we’ve continued to do digital covers. Those continue to be important to us as original photo shoots and editorials. And those also take months of planning. So it runs the gamut from daily, sometimes hourly to months in the making.

Arjun Basu: That just sounds exhausting to me.

Versha Sharma: It is exhausting. It is exhausting. And look, we have to be very discerning because we’re a very small team. Like a lot of other places, we wish we had more resources. So we continually are trying to be strategic about where our efforts and resources make the most sense.

So we cover news in a way that we can and what we know is going to matter to our audience. But we don’t always chase, like every breaking news alert, of course, that The New York Times, or Washington Post, or even a place like NowThis used to cover. That’s not Teen Vogue’s bread and butter. That’s not our strong suit. It’s also not what our audience comes to us for.

So we don’t chase the breaking news as much unless it’s like, a nice, easy, quick turnaround piece about what somebody wore on the red carpet or something that feels very monumental. The raid on Trump at Mar-a-Lago comes to mind because that was like something that happened after 6pm, and a couple of us logged on and got it up within an hour because that felt like a monumental enough event that we wanted to cover it and explain it to our audience. It is exhausting. I agree with you there.

Arjun Basu: And being all digital, how much back and forth is there with the audience? It’s just easier for them to reach out or say something, obviously. All media deal with it, but given your audience, I just imagine there’s a lot more back and forth for the interaction.

Versha Sharma: Absolutely. Yeah. The feedback loop is pretty much immediate, right? Like we’ll post something on Instagram and TikTok and we’re looking at the comments or we’re even replying to people in real time.

When X was more of a thing, we would have these conversations on X and Twitter as well. So yes, there is a lot of real time feedback and discussion with our audience that I think is very important to us.

Arjun Basu: You touch on, X and what it used to be. I’m one of those people who remembered when Twitter started and was very excited by it. But social media as a whole just seems like it’s gone. To use that term, it’s been “enshittified,” completely. But the only place where pivot to video actually really worked were on the new platforms. And you’ve always been in video as well. So how does that change the way you approach content?

Versha Sharma: Yeah. It changes the way we approach content in that we’re always thinking about distribution and formats. And I will say that’s a work in progress that our team and our publication is doing. Despite print not being the way that we’ve distributed to our audience for many years now, when I first came on board, it felt very much like the editors had a website first or digital first, have to write an article/ that is the content mentality versus “Oh, maybe this can be a TikTok video first before we ever get something up on the website.” And that is another way to reach our audience.

I think that was a question of resources. I think that was a question of before my time, there was a big divide between print and web staff, and that took some time to bridge that gap. Again, we’re not alone in that challenge. But today it is constantly looking at what’s trending on TikTok or what people are talking about on Instagram. How can we be part of that conversation and push it forward?

And not everything has to direct back to an article on our website that gives us clicks, that helps us with our KPIs or our ad sales. But that does still matter, right? We have to make money. We have to keep the lights on. We want to keep doing what we’re doing. So that is part of the equation as well.

And to be honest, I think we’re facing the same existential questions and challenges that the whole industry is facing with these social platforms, which is just as Google, and formerly Facebook, took more of a share of this traffic and became the platforms that you had to publish to natively if you wanted to be relevant and reach your audience. And now they’ve decided they’re going to downgrade or de-prioritize news and politics and even culture and lifestyle content. What do we do with that?

We’re having those conversations in real time. And I think, there’s an interesting shift that’s also true of Condé Nast and the wider industry in general, where we’re back to brainstorming: How do we bring direct traffic to our platforms and to our websites we, maybe, thought were dead once upon a time? But it matters.

“There are things that print does better than digital—some of that is curation and some of that is the visuals.”

Arjun Basu: Yeah nothing’s ever dead. But search might be. I’m not a big fan of SEO in terms of what it’s done to writing. But I understand its importance and the SEO Industrial Complex that’s built up over the years. And now SEO seems like if it’s not dead yet, it’s going to be dead soon. And that traffic is just going to go away. You’re going to have to do the hard work yourselves. So how do you measure? Is it engagement? Is it clicks? Is it visitors? What do you measure?

Versha Sharma: In the last year and two, I’d say we’ve shifted our emphasis to engagement, audience engagement, which I think is a great and much better metric to be chasing than just views or page views. So we’re looking at time spent on an article, number of minutes spent, same thing with a video, like what are our actual watch through rates? Not just whatever the total number of views any platform may be telling us it is.

And then also what’s been interesting with our audience in terms of engagement, since the pandemic began, is that return to in person events. And we’ve seen real enthusiasm among young people for those in person events.

Teen Vogue Summit has been our annual tentpole event for many years now. The last couple of years since I’ve been here, we’ve sold out every single year. There’s a real appetite for that in-person connection and community building. And that’s something that excites me. I want us to be doing more of that more frequently.

Arjun Basu: I just imagine for your readership that desire is even greater. I read a brand piece recently and they called the younger generation “C” as in COVID. And everything that the kids have gone through—they’ve missed things like graduation. School was screwed up for them, they got into college and then they had to stay home. So I’m not surprised. The rise of events, especially for young people, must be strong, the desire for it.

Versha Sharma: Exactly. And that’s exactly why. It’s also interesting to me. And it’s why we continue to prioritize actually elevating the voices of young people. This same generation—the high schoolers who might have missed their high school graduation because of COVID. Now, if they’ve gone through four years of college, four years later, they’ve had their graduations disrupted or canceled once again because of the college protests.

It’s fascinating to me what this younger generation is going through. And that’s just why, I’m very grateful to be in the job that I am and to be able to have some responsibility and ability to reflect those changes. Because it has been such a tumultuous four years—for all of us, of course—but especially for young people going through these milestones and to have them continuously disrupted in some way.

Arjun Basu: Do you think there’s anything you can’t do because you don’t have a print edition? That probably just shows my bias, but you haven’t had a print edition since 2017. So whatever you have now is baked in, but do you think there’s anything you can’t do?

Versha Sharma: That’s a really interesting question. I don’t think there’s anything that we can’t do in some form on digital, or social, onsite, or in video, but I’m old school myself and I love magazines. And I’m still a subscriber myself to some magazines inside Condé Nast and outside. And one thing I think is interesting is, I don’t know if you saw Nylon recently returned to print.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, we spoke to them a few weeks ago.

Speaker 4: Oh, good.

Arjun Basu: I spoke to Emma Rosenblum. And I spoke to Kat Craddock from Saveur, which has just come back in print. It’s happening.

Versha Sharma: Yes. I have a dream of bringing Teen Vogue back to print in some way. And I think there’s an interesting trend toward these older forms of media where you’ve probably seen, like, vinyl sales exceeding CD sales in the last couple of years.

Arjun Basu: Not just vinyl. Cassettes are coming back.

Versha Sharma: Oh my God, yes. Yeah.

Arjun Basu: Taylor Swift put out cassettes of her last album! People just want to touch things. And all of the #BookTokers and stuff—they’re promoting books on TikTok, but they’re holding actual books.

Versha Sharma: Yes.

Arjun Basu: And, e-book sales have plateaued and aren’t going to get any higher. People like “stuff.” And they like holding stuff. And the thing that I always thought about magazines was that they’re sensual. And they’re more important, I think, in a way when you can hold them as opposed to a screen. And especially kids, because of COVID and everything, they’re just tired of screens. And it becomes like a totem, too, like an identifier.

Versha Sharma: Exactly. Yes, that’s very true. And I think, your question is there anything that we can’t do? And I just think it’s not necessarily about the can or can’t, but there are things that magazines and print do better than digital does, and some of that is curation and some of that is the visuals seeing a magazine spread with a beautiful photo shoot and beautiful visuals that our creative director has worked so hard on is different than looking at it on your phone, right?

You can still appreciate it on your phone screen, but it is different. And so I think, yes, there’s that appetite for all those reasons that you mentioned for people to have that again. And I also think there's beauty and creativity in what a lot of us did growing up when we were just cutting out pieces of magazines and making collages on our bedroom walls or mood boards and inspirations.

Pinterest is now the digital version of that. But people do enjoy having that material vision board. And I think that’s something that we’d love to tap into too.

Arjun Basu: Do you have any idea what percentage of your readership is guys?

Versha Sharma: We do. It’s about 65/35. I think 65 female, 35 male. And that changes depending on the platform. And also there’s been a real shift with Gen Z and younger people about how they view gender. So I think some of these statistics are actually outdated. I know we have a good amount of trans and non binary readers as well. But not necessarily the measurements to be able to tell you how many.

Arjun Basu: It’s not one of the first questions you would ask.

Versha Sharma: Yeah.

Arjun Basu: Your page, your election HQ page is so thorough and it’s so well done. It’s everything from a primer to people who are just not familiar with the process to some really deep stuff. And then you have your student correspondents. I don’t think that it matters that it’s print or digital, it’s probably better digital because it’s more accessible. How do you come up with your student correspondents? Because this is an important part of what you guys do.

Versha Sharma: Yeah, absolutely. I’m glad you mentioned that, and I appreciate what you said about it, because our politics coverage and our election coverage, certainly this year, is very important to us. The student correspondents program came about—again, we’ve always done this in elections past. We’ve either had a student panel who weighed in or for the 2022 midterms. We did some longer form videos with student roundtables talking about issues.

So when we looked at 2024 and tried to decide what our coverage was going to look like. Allegra Kirkland, our politics director, and Lex McMenamin, our news and politics editor, we all came up with the idea of student correspondents together being our main correspondents for the year.

And I think one thing that is also key about this program is that it’s seven students in seven swing states. So we chose these swing states very carefully because we know that they’re going to have an outsized effect on whatever the election outcome is. And we also know, which is something that I think we’ve seen with the college protests as well in the last couple of months, student journalists are incredible.

I was a student journalist myself. I was editor-in-chief of my college paper. We’ve got several people on staff who were. And they are also a group that does really impressive work and is almost constantly underestimated, or undermined, or just not reported on. And so it was really exciting to us to have the idea to have the student correspondents being our lead reporters for the election and leading our coverage in that way.

Sharma on the set of *Good Morning America*

Arjun Basu: Is Teen Vogue a window or a door?

Versha Sharma: Is it a window or a door? It’s all of those things. It’s a window. It’s a door. It’s a leader. It’s a mirror. Like we both reflect our audience, and we also want to lead some of these conversations as well.

Arjun Basu: And what’s the filter for saying, “We should pursue this, or is anyone really talking about it, or maybe we shouldn’t?” Is there a filter there in terms of the responsibility to have with your audience?

Versha Sharma: Yeah. Yeah. The filter is, Do young people actually care about this? Or do they need to know about it? Does it materially affect their lives in a given way? And that’s our guiding North Star. Student debt, for example, we just put out a week-long project in series about student debt and how it affects different groups differently. And obviously it’s a real crisis in our country. And there is, again, more pressure on the Biden administration to do more about it.

The climate crisis—all of these issues that young people are either leading on or view with a real kind of urgency because the clock is literally ticking on a lot of them, that’s our filter. That’s how we view it. Reproductive rights is another huge one for us and our audience. Of course, it coming under fire in the last couple of years has been really hard for a lot of people to see.

And guess what? It impacts young women in really horrible ways. The limited access to reproductive care, or now increasingly birth control in some areas, is having a real impact on these young women. And so those are stories that we try to prioritize and elevate. And that’s our view.

I’ll give you an example. I’ll be open and honest about this. Something that I find very personally important that I’m still working on is how do we talk to our audience about this and get them to care in a way that they care about other issues—it’s Trump. And the threat to democracy. And it’s not that young people don’t care about it, it’s just that they rate so many of these other crises higher.

Which is understandable. But that’s a big challenge that I think we, Teen Vogue, everybody has going into November this year is how do you tell that story in a way that’s not patronizing. And then also how do you talk to first time voters, who were 11 years old when Trump was first elected, who do not have core memories of what his administration was like? I feel like we have an educational responsibility there as well.

Arjun Basu: Anyone who is 10 or 11 or whatever, he’s been in the media the whole time. So he’s normalized. Any politician would be, good or bad. And that cycle, for first-time voters especially, there’s a lot of education involved. Historical context just isn’t there. It’s just what they read in their history books. And depending on your school, that may or may not have been the right lesson.

Versha Sharma: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And schools, right? Schools, school boards, libraries have become a battleground too. It feels like everything that is a culture war, political war these days has some angle that affects young people directly in particular.

Arjun Basu: So how does Teen Vogue grow in the future? What does that look like? What is the plan?

Versha Sharma: I think it goes back to you always having to be quick and ready to adapt because things change so quickly and new platforms emerge that you’re not even thinking about that will be the dominant platform five years from now. But I think it is investing in our audience, our content, our storytelling. And continuing to prioritize where they actually are. Where are they consuming news, where are they consuming storytelling, and how can Teen Vogue reach them there.

So right now, for young people, that is TikTok, of course. It is Instagram. It is YouTube, still, massively. And it is Snapchat. Snapchat has seen a really interesting resurgence among young people, especially younger teens, where I think we’re moving away from the open network era of Facebook to these closed community groups and eras.

Kids just want to DM their friends, or be in their group chat and their group text with people that they trust, and talk to them and share their content there. So that’s where I think we need to focus our work, and our distribution, and resources.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. The community aspect is such a big deal as we get more and more siloed because of the technology we have. And your events are certainly big and probably getting bigger. Do you see that as something that you’re going to do more of in the future?

Versha Sharma: Absolutely. Absolutely. Traditionally, our Teen Vogue Summit has been this annual event in LA. I really want to expand it to more events throughout the year and more events geographically. I want to go to other cities. I want to meet our readers there. People pay to fly to Summit because that’s how important Teen Vogue Summit is to them. Last year I met a girl who flew from Paris because she wanted to be there and meet the Teen Vogue editors.

So I think, again, there’s a real appetite for those kinds of in person community events and I want to expand as much as we can to reach those people. And to the community aspect, I do think we have something really remarkable here with who our audience is. If you come to Teen Vogue Summit, and you should if you have any interest, you’ll see that our audience is, like, mostly young black and brown women.

How many other events do you go to where you can say that, hosted by a publisher? Like I think because of who I am, because of what our staff looks like and who we are directly talking to—these young girls and women who look at us and finally see themselves reflected in a way that they did not see themselves reflected in magazines for a very long time. And so I just think that’s something very special that I want to continue and that I want to protect.

Arjun Basu: So they’re like celebrations in a way.

Versha Sharma: Absolutely. Absolutely. They’re celebrations. They’re, like, group therapy sometimes. We had Saweetie, the rapper and singer, headline at Summit a couple years ago, and her Q&A with the audience really turned into a group therapy session where she got really deep and emotional in giving advice and telling these young girls to be confident. And it was just really beautiful to see those moments of connection. I think that is what makes it all worth it.

Arjun Basu: So we always end with this question. What are three magazines or media that excite you right now?

Versha Sharma: So Nylon for sure. Because, again, this was already on my radar to brainstorm ways to bring Teen Vogue back to print. So when I saw that they were doing it, I was so excited for them. I think New York magazine and The Cut does a great job of being clued into what young people are talking about at any given time on the internet. And also they’re very good at leading the conversation, right? Like they have those personal essays that they publish and everybody’s talking about them for weeks at a time.

Another one is The 19th, which is actually one of our publishing partners. But I’ve been really excited to see what they have done with a targeted audience of women and how successful their membership business has been. And they actually just got a huge investment from Melinda Gates, as well. So to me, The 19th is one of the best examples of a new media organization that operates in, kind of, the same space that Teen Vogue does. And they’re actually doing well. So it’s encouraging to see that.