mediabistro.com: Articles: There Goes My Hero—Finally. Why Jane Pratt's Jane never quite lived up to Jane Pratt's Sassy By Michelle Orange – September 14, 2005

Jane has always given itself too much credit—touting its ability to address this legitimacy gap between men's and women's magazines and treat young women as more than mannequins with wallets—but never more than in the last year. In the three years between Sassy's demise and Jane's debut I relied on Bust magazine (that would be the voice of the new girl order), for smart, funny content written by women. It was no Sassy, but then I suppose I was no teenager, and in trying to find a magazine that struck that same balance between the self-involved and the self-serious I was bound to run into a few that skewed too far either way. I bought the t-shirt—I bought two—and then Jane finally arrived.

"People love to be super-critical of Jane," Christina Kelly says, "and a lot of the criticism is unrealistic, because it's a commercial magazine, and as a commercial magazine it pushes the limits as far as they can go." But... what about..."Sassy was an aberration," she sighs, wearily, "and we were allowed to exist for a short time..." I can hear the irritation in her voice, and in case there was any doubt, she tells me: "I find it so irritating when people ask me about a modern counterpart to Sassy, like they expect us to spend the rest of our careers trying to create that."

26 year-old Chicago writer Claire Zulkey mmhm I think I've seen her blog maybe book rvws on it?, a Jane subscriber for three years (and, it should be noted, not burdened with Sassy baggage), recently decided to let her subscription lapse. Sometime after the re-design last fall she noticed that the worst of Jane was starting to get the best of Jane. "The mixed messages got too strong: they're snarky about celebrities but also snarky about celebrity snarkiness," she says of a magazine that gives the gauche Pamela Anderson a column but chastises former cover girl Brittany Murphy for posing for Maxim, or preaches a DIY ethos but condemns knock-offs. "Jane has lost its identity, but it still has the cooler-than-you tone."

Pratt's diary entry for April 2005, titled "I Sure Can Pick 'Em", detailed what losers some of her former colleagues have turned out to be. She used the space to mock the former assistant who, at 34, is living with her parents in Michigan, and the writer who—laughably, Pratt implies—went on to write headlines like "How to Rope Him in With Five Simple Moves". This from a magazine that thinks a photo of Ashlee Simpson's hotel bathroom sink is a great back page. The rank bitchery of the letter served no other purpose than inflicting hurt and heralding the spirit of the magazine as officially rancid. April 2005 was also the first issue to feature the slashed price of $1.99, and it's no wonder. I had to face it: at some point Jane Pratt drank the Kool-Aid. The magazine consistently left me feeling defeated, remembering why I don't read women's magazines. I don't care how busy Jane Pratt is, and if I don't care about Jane, how can I care about Jane? I would not be back, though for research purposes I checked out the August issue at the library. Again Pratt's letter sets the obnoxious, exclusive tone: an "inside" look at magazine production that does little more than let cover subject Kelly Clarkson know that she was seventh choice, and that Pratt finds her "cheesy."

Back in Australia, Sandra Yates did not follow her protégée's post-Sassy career, and only saw the launch issue of Jane. "I'm not aware that it was meant to be anything other than a magazine about traditional young women's topics," she says. "I assumed that after the Sassy experience, Jane would have been perfectly justified in opting for something safer." Yates is realistic about the trade-off between advertising and editorial content that women's magazines generally have to make, but still baffled by the idea that fewer than 300 letters to Sassy's five biggest advertisers (part of a boycott spearheaded by Focus on the Family 's Dr James Dobson, whom, Yates notes, "has continued to prosper, and is very close to the President") brought the magazine to its knees in the space of a week.

Clearly, the advertising game is no joke, and perhaps it's better to ante up than fold completely; the problem is that most women's magazines try to double deal, using words like "aspirational" to justify the unrealistic, highly charged standards of beauty and lifestyle they set. Jane, because it held itself above that predictable sleight of hand, and because of its genuinely groundbreaking heritage, made itself a lightning rod for all of the women out there desperate for a magazine they could be proud of. We're used to throwing up our hands, just don't mistake it for a wave good-bye.


Michelle Orange is a Torontonian living in New York. Her writing has appeared in Salon, The Sun Magazine and McSweeney's, among others. good article. maybe esp stands out from the gawker tidbits I've been reading, since this is comparatively lengthy and substantive.