#Alexi McCammond returns to Axios after Teen Vogue fiasco, ouster

Alexi McCammond — who resigned as editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue in March days before she started the job after an uproar over racially charged social media posts — is returning to her former job as a political reporter for Axios.

On Tuesday, Axios — where McCammond had notable bouts with everyone from Donald Trump to former NBA star Charles Barkley since starting in 2017 — said it was happy to have her back. She had been working at NBC News since her Teen Vogue withdrawal.

“Alexi McCammond is an accomplished journalist and professional,” Axios co-founder and CEO Jim VandeHei said. “We’re excited and proud that she is returning to Axios.”

Some of McCammond’s former colleagues at Axios — where she had covered Joe Biden’s presidential campaign — were among her staunchest defenders as she got slammed over comments she had made about Asians a decade earlier as a freshman at the University of Chicago.

“I worked with her for four years,” Axios political reporter Jonathan Swan said in an appearance on the Fox News show “America’s Newsroom.” “She doesn’t have a racist bone in her body. If we can’t as an industry accept somebody’s sincere and repeated apologies for something they tweeted when they were 17 years old, what are we doing?”

The hiring of McCammond, 29, initially looked like a step by Condé Nast to diversify its leadership. She had been named “Emerging Journalist of the Year” in 2019 by the National Association of Black Journalists. But when deleted comments she had made a decade earlier on social media complaining about Asians resurfaced, she became a victim of the woke crowd.

She issued several public apologies and Condé Nast, headed editorially by chief content officer and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, initially hoped to weather the controversy.

But editorial staffers at Teen Vogue publicly expressed their anger over the hiring to Wintour and CEO Roger Lynch. As the controversy continued to swirl last March, McCammond and Condé Nast issued a statement saying she had decided to step down.

“I became a journalist to help lift up the stories and voices of our most vulnerable communities,” McCammond said in a statement back in March announcing her decision to not take the job.

“As a young woman of color, that’s part of the reason I was so excited to lead the Teen Vogue team in its next chapter. 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.”

Wintour cast a wide net in her search for a replacement for McCammond, and in May announced she would be succeeded by Versha Sharma from NowThis News.