About Jane

Jane

Jane was an American women's lifestyle magazine published in New York, New York, from September 1997 to August 2007. It was created by editor Jane Pratt, who had made her reputation a decade earlier with the teen magazine Sassy, and it was aimed at women aged eighteen to thirty-four who had outgrown teen titles but found conventional women's magazines alienating. Launched by Fairchild Publications, then owned by Disney, Jane was purchased with Fairchild by Condé Nast in 1999. Its first cover featured Drew Barrymore, and at its debut it carried a rate base of 400,000. Pratt resigned in 2005, Brandon Holley succeeded her, and Condé Nast folded the magazine with its August 2007 issue, shutting its website as well. Jane's ten-year life traced the last decade in which a personality-led print magazine could still be built around a young female audience.

Jane Pratt After Sassy

Jane existed because of Sassy. Pratt had created Sassy in the late 1980s as a teen magazine distinguished by sexual candour and by coverage other teen titles avoided, including the riot grrrl movement, and its popularity exploded beyond its intended adolescent audience into a devoted young-adult readership. When Sassy's New York editorial run ended in 1994 after the title was bought by the Los Angeles-based Petersen Publishing, those readers were left, in the word often used at the time, heartbroken, and waiting for a successor. Pratt regrouped with several former Sassy staffers. She first developed the new magazine inside Time Inc. Ventures for nearly two years, but when that division folded she took the project to Fairchild Publications and launched it there. The intended name was Betty; everyone else involved voted her down, and the magazine took her own first name instead.

The Launch, September 1997

Jane's first issue appeared in September 1997, published monthly by the Disney-owned Fairchild Publications, with Drew Barrymore as its maiden cover subject and a guaranteed advertising rate base of 400,000, a serious circulation commitment for an untested title. The positioning was precise: a lifestyle magazine for women from eighteen to thirty-four, written in the confessional, funny, best-friend voice Pratt had pioneered, covering fashion and beauty alongside sex, relationships, work, pop culture, and the untidy realities of young women's lives. The launch audience overlapped deliberately with the grown-up Sassy readership, and the magazine quickly established itself as the print home of a generation of women and of the young female writers who would define the following decade's confessional journalism.

Fairchild, Condé Nast, and the Magazine's World

Fairchild Publications was bought by Condé Nast Publications in 1999, moving Jane into the industry's most prestigious magazine stable alongside Vogue, Glamour, and Vanity Fair. The fit was commercially useful and culturally awkward: Jane's appeal rested on feeling like an insurgent alternative to glossy women's titles, a posture harder to sustain inside the glossiest house of all. Its cast of contributors reflected Pratt's eclectic network. Pamela Anderson wrote a regular monthly column; musician Michael Stipe, whom Pratt dated, was part of its circle; director Spike Jonze, hired by Pratt to edit the short-lived boy-targeted title Dirt, belonged to its extended family; actress Chloë Sevigny had been a Sassy intern before Jane existed. Such connections kept the magazine plugged into downtown New York culture even as its ownership became thoroughly corporate.

Recognition and Growth Under Pratt

Under Pratt, Jane was both a commercial and a critical success by the standards of its category. The magazine was nominated for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence by the American Society of Magazine Editors, the industry's highest honour, and Adweek named Pratt Editor of the Year in 2002. Circulation climbed steadily from the 400,000 launch base, and by the day Pratt announced her departure the magazine counted about 700,000 readers. That growth vindicated the founding bet: the audience Sassy had educated did exist as adults, would follow an editor they trusted across a decade, and could be delivered to advertisers as a coherent demographic of women in their twenties and early thirties, a segment the established women's service magazines, aimed at older homemakers, had neglected.

Pratt's Resignation in 2005

On July 25, 2005, Pratt announced that she was resigning as editor-in-chief of Jane and would leave the company on September 30, 2005, exactly eight years after the magazine's debut. She cited, in subsequent accounts, a wish to follow other interests, including travel, and she went on to a satellite radio show and later to digital publishing. In August 2005 Brandon Holley, the editor-in-chief of Elle Girl, was named to succeed her, with Stephanie Trong, on staff since 1999, remaining as executive editor and Elle Girl's Christina Kelly moving in the opposite direction. Holley gave the magazine a more positive, conventionally girly attitude and a redesign that appeared the following year. The transition posed the question that has ended many founder-led magazines: whether Jane was a transferable brand or simply Jane Pratt's sensibility with a staff attached.

The Fold, July 2007

Condé Nast answered that question on July 9, 2007, when its president and chief executive Charles Townsend announced that Jane would cease publication with its August 2007 issue and that its website, janemag.com, would also close. The final issue reached readers on July 24. Holley and publisher Carlos LaMadrid left the company. The announcement acknowledged the effort made since Pratt's departure, Townsend saying the company had worked diligently to make Jane a success but had concluded that the magazine and website would not meet its long-term business expectations. The trade press noted a paradox in the numbers: newsstand sales were reported down, yet Publishers Information Bureau figures showed advertising revenue and pages up sharply through March 2007. Whatever the precise mix, a two-year attempt to run Jane without Jane had ended, and the title joined the decade's growing list of young women's magazines closed despite loyal audiences. The human side of the shutdown reached television: the experiences of two Jane assistants during the folding were chronicled on the Soapnet series The Fashionista Diaries.

What Jane Stood For

Jane's editorial identity joined candour to comedy. Where traditional women's magazines instructed readers to please others, Jane assumed its readers were funny, sexual, ambitious, broke, confused, and uninterested in being perfected, and it wrote to them in the first person, with writers' own experiences as material. That voice, inherited from Sassy and matured, anticipated the confessional register that migrated online in the following decade, when former Jane and Sassy readers and writers populated the blogosphere and early women's websites. Pamela Anderson's monthly column, celebrity covers from Drew Barrymore to Mariah Carey, and features that mixed fashion with genuinely reported pieces embodied a formula that treated pop culture as women's serious business rather than their guilty pleasure.

After Jane: xoJane and the Digital Inheritance

Pratt's afterlife for the magazine confirmed where its audience had gone. In 2011 she launched the website xoJane with Say Media, explicitly reviving the voice she had built in print for the internet generation, and in 2015 Time Inc. acquired xoJane, bringing Pratt back into the orbit of the company where Jane had first been developed in the 1990s. She had meanwhile collaborated with the young fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson on Rookie, a magazine project for teenage girls conceived in Sassy's spirit. The through-line is instructive for a directory entry: the print Jane of 1997 to 2007 was the middle term between a teen magazine of the 1980s and the women's internet of the 2010s, carrying one editorial sensibility across three media eras, and its closure said less about its readers, who followed Pratt online, than about the economics of Condé Nast print.

Legacy

Jane lasted ten years, published roughly a hundred issues, won the industry's respect, and was mourned in print by the generation it had served, a reaction few cancelled magazines receive. Its historical importance lies in proving the adult market for the Sassy sensibility, in giving early magazine homes to a generation of women writers, and in marking, with unusual clarity, the dependence of personality magazines on their founding editors: circulation had risen throughout Pratt's tenure, and the title survived her by less than two years. Surviving issues, National Magazine Award records, and the extensive trade coverage of its launch and closure make it one of the best-documented American magazine stories of its decade, and the standard case study of the young women's category's last print flowering before the web absorbed its audience.