In 1988, at 24 years old, Jane Pratt founded the cult teen magazine Sassy, one of the most influential publications of the Gen X era. Sassy’s tone, which was bright but sharp was all hers.
Ms. Pratt, the San Francisco born, North Carolina raised small blonde with the big laugh led a mostly female editorial team — many of whom went on to their own prominent careers in media — publishing stories on teen suicide, masturbation and gender fluidity at a time when competitors were selling teenage girls advice on planning their future weddings and getting boys to call.
Sassy convinced a generation of young people to look at the world through girls’ eyes. Contributors like Spike Jonze and Michael Stipe were Sassy disciples, ensuring that every boy with River Phoenix bangs and a guitar beside his bed longed to one day be featured in Sassy’s iconic Cute Band Alert section or at least crushed on by a Sassy girl. Brian Eno once said that everyone who bought the Velvet Underground’s first record went on to start a band. Sometimes it feels like everyone who adored Sassy, from celebrity cover stars like Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain to one of the magazine’s first lowly interns, who happened to be Chloë Sevigny, went on to live wildly interesting lives.
Same goes for Ms. Pratt, who became one of the most influential magazine editors of her era, founding Jane in 1997, and then moving into the digital realm with xoJane in 2012. She’s had plenty of false starts, too, including a short-lived talk show and her most recent project, DeeDa, a marketing and e-commerce site that never fully got off the ground. A proud single mother, Ms. Pratt never married, “intentionally,” she said, and lives in Manhattan with her daughter, a student at Sarah Lawrence from whom Ms. Pratt gleefully sources new ideas for her latest act: an online magazine that she’s calling, cheekily, Another Jane Pratt Thing.
On the one hand this new venture is different from anything she has ever tried. Hosted on Substack — and thus funded by subscribers, cutting out the need to please advertisers — it’s not aimed at young women or at women at all necessarily; it’s for people of all genders and all ages. At the same time, Another Jane Pratt Thing also aims to accomplish exactly what Ms. Pratt has been doing all along: shining a light on subjects that aren’t being talked about and discussing them in uniquely direct ways to help readers feel less alone. In a wide-ranging conversation near her west side home, Ms. Pratt talked about her editorial partners, the breadth of her site’s coverage and a menopausal exercise experience. This interview has been edited and condensed.
What was the impetus for Another Jane Pratt Thing?
At Sassy we lost 15 of our top advertisers immediately because I published something about gay teenagers. We got delisted from 70 percent of our newsstands because of something I published about birth control. With this project, there isn’t a corporate overlord. There is nobody that has power over us.
You talk about your editorial team and your readers as part of the same community.
I go back to something I wrote in my journal when I was 15. It was a list of things that I wanted to do in my lifetime, and one of them was “start a magazine.” In parentheses it said, “with friend.” That was an important component of it, and it still is an important component of it. It’s really about all of us.
That’s interesting because most writers are kind of solo operators.
I’ve never considered myself a writer. Maybe that’s why I champion other nonwriters. I like the way it sounds when someone who doesn’t consider themselves a writer writes. I have more the mind-set of the live arts. I like to just do it as it comes and then fix it as we go. One thing I love about the nature of this project and other things online is that it’s not about getting it perfect.
You’re working again with a number of editors you’ve worked with before, like Sassy’s Christina Kelly and the memoirist and xoJane’s former beauty editor Cat Marnell.
And Esther Haynes, who worked with me at Jane. And Charlie Connell, who was the editor in chief of Inked magazine, and Vanessa De Luca, who was editor in chief of Essence magazine for many years — they were both new to me. It’s so fun to see what everybody brings that you didn’t even know you were looking for. The editors were willing to jump in on the basis that we’re equal partners in the revenue, which I love. It brings me right back to my Quaker upbringing. I feel good about that. We’re all putting in an effort, and we’re all going to benefit, or not, equally.
The Courtneys, as you call them — Courteney Cox and Courtney Love — will also be contributing, as well as your longtime friend Michael Stipe.
He’s doing something for us right at the beginning about voter registration. I also got in touch with the artist Doug Coupland, and he’s writing something for the launch. It’s really fun to have someone like him or Feminista Jones, who is a regular with us also, right next to a freshman at Sarah Lawrence who has an amazing story. I’m also writing more this time than I did at xoJane. One is about how I got odor-shamed at SoulCycle. The rider next to me told the front desk that I smelled bad during class. It was a menopause thing that was going on.
I know you’re saying this project is for people of all genders and all ages, but you have to figure out what you’re going to actually put on the page. Are we going to see more stuff about menopause, I.V.F., adjusting to college? How do you think conceptually about who you’re talking to?
I know it sounds like a terrible, terrible pitch, but you are actually going to see all those things. We’re writing about whatever is of interest to us, the whole community.
I’m wondering, in a world where the kind of writing you’re trying to generate — authentic, confessional, vulnerable communication — has been wildly commodified by social media culture to the point that it feels meaningless, why get back in?
When we started Sassy, it was because people weren’t telling those first person confessional stories. That was revolutionary at the time. But that changed. Now it’s everywhere. It’s too much. But I still think there’s a need for stories that are not getting told, told by people that are not getting heard, and in a place that is supportive, inclusive and where it’s not there to be picked apart.
OK, one final thing. I searched your name on X and came across this post from the journalist Andrew Male that I think captures what people imagine your life was like during the Sassy/Jane era. He wrote: “I was asked by Jane Pratt to leave Michael Stipe’s 38th birthday party (held at Jane’s apartment) because my presence was upsetting The Beastie Boys, who I’d done an irreverent Q interview with a month earlier.” Does this ring any bells?
[Laughs]. OK, I don’t think that I went up to him and told him to leave, but I would have. It’s not out of character.
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