Too Young to Know: The Selling of Sassy - by Daniel Radosh - radosh.net/writing

Sassy's radical approach was to give readers information and assume they were intelligent enough to draw their own conclusions. When staff writer Mary Ann Marshall wrote a fairly harsh profile of a teenage heroin addict but neglected to conclude with some version of don't try this at home, she was flooded with angry letters from parents who accused her of telling people who to use drugs.
Sassy was less restrained when it came to politics, and felt no compunction about sweeping rants and blanket condemnations there ("Nine Things About America That Make Us Want to Scream and Throw Stuff"). But other teen mags never bring up politics at all, unless it's, you know, animal rights, gun control, the environment. Sassy actually explained the historical roots of the Gulf War and lamented the death of family farms. What's more, the girls read it. The Gulf War article generated more mail than any other story in the magazine's history. cool
"It was the first magazine to treat readers with any respect at all," insists senior writer Margie Ingall. "And it permeated the magazine; it wasn't just, here's the section where we treat the readers like they have a brain -- make sure it doesn't seep out and taint the eye-makeup coverage."

Early in its history, Sassy was bought from the Australians by Dale Lang, who also owns Ms and Working Woman. By 1992, Lang managed to recoup his initial debt, but the magazine never turned a profit. Last April, he began looking for new investors.
By summer, the gallows humor was evident around the Sassy offices. The spine of the July '94 issue -- a space other magazines use to list contents, but which Sassy reserves for random thoughts -- winked, "Would you like fries with that?" The staff was practicing for their future employment. ah. cheeky.
On September 27, Lang sent a memo to the Sassy staff. "It is with deep regret that I must inform you Sassy magazine is being put up for immediate sale... I want all of you to know I've done everything possible to avoid this action. Sassy is a potentially great magazine and you are a fine young group of professional magazine people. You both deserve a chance that I can no longer provide."
"Potentially great?" was editor Christina Kelly's first reaction. Kelly called Lang's office and demanded an all-staff meeting.
Two days later, Jane Pratt appeared. From the beginning, founding-editor-in-chief Pratt was something of a figurehead. Cute, warm, and hip, the 24-year-old was the perfect person to pitch the Sassy concept to new readers and skeptical advertisers. For a while she actually edited the magazine too, althought it was people like Christina Kelly and Mary Kaye Schilling who provided the genuine style that readers responded to.
"Christina is more legitimately hip than Jane will ever be," confides one staffer, "but that's not what sells ads." So when Jane left in 1991 to host first one and then another disastrous daytime talk show, she remained on the masthead, while Schilling and then Kelly actually took charge. In hindsight, some people suggest, Lang should have dropped Pratt and given Kelly free reign at this juncture -- maybe she could have reinvigorated advertisers. In any case, by September 1994 it was rare for Pratt to visit the office.
Her reason for being there was to tell Lang and the staff of Sassy that she would not be going down with the ship. She was taking a job at Time Inc. Ventures, the putatively hipper branch of the media giant, with whom she'd been quietly developing a relationship for over a year.

Kelly and her predecessors took pride in their editorial independence, and more than a few envelope-pushing articles led to pulled ads. (not that it took much; when Sassy praised the merits of Teen Spirit deodorant -- this was pre-Nirvana -- but editorialized, "gag on the name," Mennen cancelled several ads as punishment.) hey I remember I liked the deodorant. and yes, despite the name.

To tell the truth, Sassy had a lot more problems than you'd feel comfortable bringing up in a memorial tribute. The inevitable fashion spreads were virtually identical to everyone else's. .. Sassy could lay on the lefty posturing a little thick too. .. But in the end, a 25-year-old guy can't help but feel admiration when a magazine aimed at teenage girls manages to piss him off. Indeed, while Sassy's median age was 15.4, it always had a cult following among the college and post-college set. Part of the appeal for older readers is what The New Republic described as the sense that Sassy was at once a teen magazine and a parody of teen magazines. Casual readers can be forgiven more for missing the irony.

Says Ingall, calling Sassy "The Magazine that talks about sex," is totally missing the point. "It should be `the only teen magazine ever to be nominated for a National Magazine Award for general excellence,' or `the only teen magazine where people grab you at parties and say, Oh my god, I love your magazine!"
Of course, if you're going to get into that, you'd have to add that it's the only teen magazine with advice columns written by Billy Corgan and Dean Ween; the only teen magazine whose "One to Watch" column has featured both Matthew Sweet (before Girlfriend) and 22-year-old astronomer Ben Oppenheimer; the only teen magazine whose review of In Utero ended with the sentence, "Kurt, I'm worried about your state of mind."