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Maybe It Wasn’t All About Her Tweets
There’s probably more to Alexi McCammond’s sudden rise and fall as Teen Vogue’s top editor than her teenage tweets.
I’ll be honest.
When I first read that former Axios reporter Alexi McCammond had backed out of becoming the next editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue due to past anti-Asian and anti-gay social media posts, I was immediately struck not by her tweets but by how young she was. At 27, McCammond would have been younger than her predecessor, Lindsay Peoples Wagner, who made history as Teen Vogue’s youngest appointed editor-in-chief at the age of 29. And among chief editors at other Condé Nast publications, McCammond would have been the least experienced. Samantha Barry, the current editor-in-chief for Glamour, was an executive producer for CNN prior to taking her new role. Vanity Fair’s Radhika Jones was previously a managing editor at The New York Times and Time magazine. And GQ’s Will Welch has been rising up the ranks through the publication since 2007.
Even at a time when anti-Asian bigotry is in the news, and in an industry where homophobia is especially unwelcome, McCammond’s youth probably played a bigger part in her ouster at Teen Vogue than her old tweets. After all, 2011 isn’t 2001 or 1991. Being young enough to have one’s most foolish high school thoughts just a few clicks away isn’t something a top magazine editor ought to have to worry about. And even though McCammond had already apologized for and deleted the tweets a few years earlier, and had since become a reputable reporter covering Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign for Axios, she had not yet established herself in the right communities as a progressive voice in order for her social media posts to be quickly discarded as the musings of a teenage girl.
From this perspective, McCammond’s time at Teen Vogue was probably doomed from the start. And this was all foreseeable. So why did Condé Nast hire her anyway?
Here’s what Allegra Frank wrote for Slate just two days before McCammond backed out of the job, as angry staff members were going public, that starts to pick apart the mystery behind McCammond’s hiring.
What is happening at Teen Vogue is a reflection of what is happening at many…
