Photo: JaneMag.com
Jane magazine — the un-women’s-mag-like women’s mag founded by Jane Pratt in 1997 after her previous effort, Sassy, folded — is dead. Just a few months ago, Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer published How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time, which was a love letter not just to the mag but also to its founding editor. (Pratt left the magazine two years ago and was replaced by Brandon Holley.) So what do two Pratt fans think about her more recent project’s failure? “You could argue that Jane was the only mainstream women’s magazine that spoke to a less mainstream woman,” Jesella told us today. “The slightly off-the-cuff, individualist tone for an independent, twentysomething woman wasn’t seen in a lot of other magazines,” Meltzer said. Jesella continued: “People don’t feel as strongly about magazines as they used to. I think there’s a quote from Dave Eggers that in the nineties, it felt like a magazine could change the world. People don’t feel that way anymore. With Jane, it was the one magazine with a real slash factor: People either loved it or hated it, but it was one of very few that people felt really passionate about.” But not anymore. —Emma Pearse
