Newly hired Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Alexi McCammond is out of a job, before she officially started.
McCammond, 27, made the announcement Thursday shortly after The Daily Beast published a story saying Teen Vogue parent company, Condé Nast, planned to part ways with her amid controversy over decade-old tweets she posted mocking Asian people.
“I became a journalist to help lift up the stories and voices of our most vulnerable communities. As a young woman of color, that’s part of the reason I was so excited to lead the Teen Vogue team in their next chapter,” McCammond said a statement on Twitter. “My past tweets have overshadowed the work I’ve done to highlight the people and issues that I care about — issues that Teen Vogue has worked tirelessly to share with the world — and so Condé Nast and I have decided to part ways.”
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McCammond, a former political reporter at Axios, had been scheduled to start her new job as Teen Vogue‘s top editor on March 24. While she did not come from the fashion world, Teen Vogue frequently publishes stories on politics.
Right after Condé Nast announced her hiring, social media sleuths unearthed deleted tweets McCammond posted in 2011, when she was a college student.
Among the tweets, she said after returning from a party that she was searching online to find out how to avoid waking up with “Asian eyes.” In another, she complained about a “stupid Asian” teaching assistant who gave her a 2 out of 10 on a chemistry quiz.
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On March 10, the up-and-coming editor publicly addressed the controversy in a letter addressed to Teen Vogue’s staff and readers.
“This has been one of the hardest weeks of my life, in large part because of the intense pain I know my words have caused so many of you,” she wrote. “I’ve apologized for my past racist and homophobic tweets and will reiterate that there’s no excuse for perpetuating those awful stereotypes in any way.”
McCammond had been a rising star in the journalism field. She covered Joe Biden’s presidential campaign last year for Axios, was a frequent contributor on MSNBC, and the National Association of Black Journalists named her emerging journalist of the year in 2019.
She made headlines in a February scandal involving her boyfriend, then-Biden administration White House deputy press secretary TJ Ducklo, who threatened a Politico reporter working on a story about his relationship with McCammond.
Ducklo resigned after a report surfaced saying he threatened to “destroy” the reporter if she published the story.
