Has Someone Stolen Sassy’s Soul? Some Fans Think So

Molly Long wasn’t happy when she saw what had happened to one of her favorite magazines.

“I literally almost cried when I saw it,” the 18-year-old Virginia Wesleyan College sophomore said of the revamped Sassy.

Since its 1987 debut, Sassy had regularly outpaced its competitors in daring - with features about topics such as abortion and AIDS and by scrutinizing its requisite celebrity interviewees with a rigor more akin to Spy.

Sassy was sold in late 1994 by Lang Communications of New York to the Los Angeles-based Petersen Publishing Co. The new regime’s first two efforts have introduced fundamental changes to what was once the most cutting-edge monthly for teenage girls and young women.

Former editor-in-chief Jane Pratt’s reaction to the reborn Sassy was similar to Long’s. One item in the April edition stood out, she said by phone from her New York home last week.

“It was a full page of calorie counts,” Pratt said, “and they were talking about whether you should choose Dannon fat-free or Dannon 99 percent-fat-free yogurt. I stood there in the newsstand and I almost cried. We never told our readers that they had to count calories.” (One August 1994 story was “Thirteen Reasons Not to Diet,” subtitled: “Starving yourself is complete and total lunacy. Stop it this instant.”)

For fans of the original’s irreverence and smarts - or for those who came to the party in search of insight - scoping the new Sassy is like witnessing the after effects of a body snatching in an old sci-fi movie. Victims retain their appearance but lose their soul.

After skipping three months - subscriptions have been extended to cover them - the retooled book arrived in March. Intact were trademarks such as first-name-only bylines and hip graphics.

But under the new management, there was a troubling shift. The casual, genially wisecracking voice had turned forced - “impostors,” veteran reader Long pronounced the revamped staff - and features like Cute Band Alert appeared less a product of the freewheeling earlier style and more a dumping ground for publicists’ latest clients.

If March was bad, April is worse. The homogenization continues with the institution of full bylines, among other things. Sassy’s editorial director, Catherine Ettlinger, said that yet another redesign is scheduled for August, but she declined to give details.

Sassy-ites who follow the business pages might have seen the changes coming. The magazine ranked fourth in circulation among its peers, with about 800,000 copies sold each month. By contrast, Seventeen sells more than 1.9 million.

Lang spokeswoman Joan Elliott said that Sassy was never profitable, except for a period in 1992. She said that the company had hoped that Petersen would retain Sassy’s unique feel. But Petersen executive publisher Jay N. Cole said last fall that the Pratt-era Sassy “lacked some degree of responsibility” in its treatment of serious problems.

It was an echo of criticisms that dogged the publication throughout its seven-year existence. Pratt recalled a late-‘80s advertiser boycott spurred by the Moral Majority, which objected to Sassy’s frank coverage of birth control and AIDS prevention.

Such work was a decided shift from the prom-centric likes of Seventeen and ‘Teen.

“I think it was actually the only responsible magazine for teens out there,” Pratt said. “I think that not talking about birth control and not talking about AIDS is irresponsible. I think printing calorie counts when there are so many teenagers with eating disorders is irresponsible.”

Pratt credits Sassy with loosening up both editorial and design practices at the more traditional teen magazines.

She is now developing a new magazine for her current employer, Time Warner Publishing, aimed at an 18-to-30 crowd. Here’s hoping that those slightly younger can relate, too. After all, the greatest loss with Sassy’s sale may be the affection and respect it conveyed to its audience.

“That was something I strove for,” Pratt said. “It came from the feeling I had when I was 15 years old of not having a friend. We thought that if they didn’t have any friends, at least they had us.”