‘Sassy’ Girls on ‘Jane’ Closure: People Don’t Care About Mags AnymoreJane 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
intel
Jane Pratt Spurns Hagiographers, Disses AtoosaJane Pratt can’t seem to take a compliment. Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer are the authors of How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time, a just-published 128-page mash note to the dearly departed title founded by the precocious Pratt in 1988. They sent a galley copy to Pratt and might have hoped for a few kind words. Didn’t happen. “There has been no ‘good job,’ or ‘I love the book,”” says Jesella. “She spoke to our editor. And she did have a bunch of [factual] changes that we eagerly changed. And then there were some matters of, um, opinion. Which we did not change.” But Pratt did make one thing clear when she was interviewed for the project: She — and not former Sassy intern and Seventeen topper Atoosa Rubenstein, whom the authors dub “Jane Pratt #2” — was the younger editor-in-chief. “[Pratt] would note that she was only 24 and Atoosa was, what, 26?” said Meltzer. And another onetime Sassy editor is quoted noting that Rubenstein “was rejected for every position” she applied for at Sassy. Now you know. —Emma Pearse
