STATEMENT: Roosevelt Institute Reacts to Closure of Teen Vogue, Recipient of the 2025 Freedom of Speech Medal

Teen Vogue has consistently been one of the only media outlets centering the perspectives of young people, and has done so with bravery and honesty. In a moment where our country is experiencing generational shifts in thinking, we are all worse off without their reporting.

The Roosevelt Institute was honored to present Teen Vogue with the 2025 Freedom of Speech Medal because their team understood that freedom is about both speaking truth to power and the capacity to build power.

The decision by Condé Nast today to collapse this publication into Vogue and eliminate the politics reporting staff at Teen Vogue is evidence that corporate concentration eliminates innovative ideas and silences voices with less power.

So many young people today feel ignored and disempowered in every facet of their lives—by policymakers who don’t represent their generation, by legacy media that overlooks their struggles, by online spaces that solely seek to profit from their attention. 

Teen Vogue’s work showed us a different path: journalism that isn’t just trustworthy and thought-provoking, but that listens to young people’s priorities. In its coverage of everything from student debt to the climate crisis to wages for fast food workers, Teen Vogue connected the dots between the issues that matter to young people and the policy choices that underpin them. 

We at the Roosevelt Institute, and especially our Roosevelt Network program, always keep this idea in mind: tomorrow’s policymakers won’t spring from the ground fully formed—we need institutions to cultivate opportunities and relationships for a diverse cohort of young people who wouldn’t otherwise have the resources or know-how to start careers in this area.