Sassy talked to teen girls like people — the sale made it talk like a market

Sandra Yates of Australia's Fairfax Publications launched Sassy in the US in 1988, modelled on her company's teen magazine Dolly, and hired 24-year-old Jane Pratt to edit it. Sassy talked to girls aged 13 to college like people: thrift-shop fashion for real bodies, reality-based stories about teen sexuality that advertisers flinched at, 'Dear Boy' advice columns written by Iggy Pop and Billy Corgan. In April 1992 it ran the first joint Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love cover; Saturday Night Live spoofed it, and its interns — including Chloë Sevigny — were treated as trendsetters, not gofers.

In 1994 the magazine was sold to the owners of Teen magazine, and the new owners fired the entire staff, Pratt included. The new editorial team set out to make Sassy more like every other magazine on the market — which is to say, unlike itself. Readers who had written in about feeling 'a little bit different but not totally out of place' could tell immediately, and the reformat failed.

Sassy ceased publication in 1996, eight years after it began. The voice it invented didn't die with it — Pratt carried it into Jane in 1997, and magazines like Bitch, Bust and Venus Zine grew out of its wake — but the business itself proved that a cult audience is exactly what a new owner prices lowest.