Young Women Swoon As Jane Says Goodbye
It's goodbye to Jane, the magazine for 20-somethings created a decade ago by editor Jane Pratt. The magazine had been struggling for several years with declining advertising pages, and Ms. Pratt herself left the publication in 2005.
Although the chief executive officer of Condé Nast, Charles Townsend, told the industry publication Advertising Age last September that he was committed to supporting Jane, the August issue will be the magazine's last. "This was a very difficult decision for us," Mr. Townsend said. "We worked diligently to make Jane a success. However, we have come to believe that the magazine and Web site will not fulfill our long-term business expectations."
The current editor in chief, Brandon Holley, and the publisher, Carlos Lamadrid, who were brought in to try to revive the magazine, will leave Condé Nast. At a morning meeting yesterday, the magazine's 60 other staffers were told they will be considered for other positions at the company.
Both the magazine that Ms. Pratt edited and its current version promoted an offbeat and daring attitude. A recent example was a much-gossiped-about feature, "Jane's Guide to Boobs." The magazine had columns of sex advice for its readers, with headlines such as "Sleeping With Your Best Friend's Ex," and also included reviews of what it called "Smart Smut."
"Jane always had a ‘too cool for school' attitude," a former magazine editor and the author of "Little Pink Slips," a novel about the women's magazine industry, Sally Koslow, said. "Even among young women, there is a fairly limited audience for that attitude, at least in print. But I thought Jane Pratt was a very good, offbeat editor, especially when she was the editor of the teenage magazine Sassy. It was very daring. But that was a long time ago, before the Internet."
Although Jane had a circulation of 700,000, the readers the magazine tried to appeal to are young women who nowadays may be more comfortable surfing the Internet for advice than reading a magazine. And when they want that outrageous attitude, they find it on blogs, YouTube, or MySpace pages. Two other magazines for young audiences that recently stopped publishing print editions, Teen People and ELLEgirl, still have an active Web presence, but Condé Nast is also closing Jane's Web site.
Jane also had some tough magazine competition. More successful publications in this niche include Condé Nast's own Glamour, a magazine that frequently wins industry awards and is highly regarded by readers and advertisers. Hearst's Cosmopolitan also remains a major competitor in this field. And there are a slew of beauty/fashion publications, such as Marie Claire and Allure, that try to appeal to young women and, just as important, to beauty and fashion advertisers. New competitors include the celebrity weeklies, such as Us and In Touch, which have dramatically increased in both circulation and advertising pages in recent years.
Since leaving Jane, Ms. Pratt has kept a low profile, but there is occasional speculation that she is planning a new magazine — one for older women.
