Given the obstacles,
Sassy
somewhat miraculously found itself celebrating its fifth anniversary in March 1993. The issue was Mary Kaye's last; Christina was now Jane's number two and the day-to-day commander in chief. A natural writer, Christina was the easy choice for Mary Kaye's replacement, but she had never edited before and couldn't finesse the business side of the magazine the way Jane could. Whereas Jane had easily cozied up to advertisers, Christina was notoriously headstrong. “With Christina, if anyone like Dale Lang said, âYou shouldn't do that,' she would ignore it,” says Mary. Lang agrees: “She's such a great person behind the scenes, but maybe it was too hard for her with advertising. I don't think she likes doing it. It's not her forte.” Christina, for her part, admits, “I don't think they thought I presented so well, in my undershirts and jeans.”
“I remember being a fly on wall in the art department when Karmen Lizzul [
Sassy
's last art director] would present the cover and Christina worked out what should go on the cover,” Amy Demas, the magazine's associate art director, remembers. Linda Cohen, the publisher, would come in and talk about cover linesâtypical for someone in her positionâand her input would drive Christina crazy. “There was so much tension in the room it was unbelievable,” Amy says. “And we sort of listened to what Linda had to say, but probably did our own thing anyway.”
The business and editorial sides of
Sassy
had long been at odds. It was the business staff, after all, that had to deal with conservative advertisers, many of whom still wrongly thought of
Sassy
as a more risqué publication than
Seventeen
and
YM
. It didn't matter that
Sassy
had barely covered sex for years. “Everyone talked about this magazine that was risky with the sex articles, which is so irritating because we weren't even allowed to write about sex at all after the first issue, and it persisted for another six years,” says Christina, characteristically hyperbolizing a bit. “It was written about in one article, and then it got passed on, but it's not true at all.”
But because advertisers were nervous about
Sassy
's image, there were still unwritten rules that they expected the magazine's editors to follow. After the boycott, Halfin had pledged to companies that the magazine would straighten up, reminding them that Lang's magazines had a history of squeaky-clean content. Still, Lang wasn't taking any chances, and appointed Halfin to approve the magazine's table of contents every month. Halfin was so intent on getting and keeping advertisers in the fold that she was happy to breach the usual church-and-state divide. “There was one article that was very graphic about a boy who went to rape counseling, and I wasn't sure if that was over the line or not, personally. So I basically sent the article to an advertiser just to get an opinion from
her,” says Halfin. “And her husband was a rape counselor, and he thought it was fine.” That time the article ran, but more often than not the editorial side was held in check. “There were certain taboo things that we couldn't approach. I think it was abortion, homosexualityâthe very things we wanted and needed to talk about. We would have to cut things or change things for the advertisers,” Jessica says. “It was a creepy form of censorship because they weren't saying you
can't
do it, but rather âIf you do it, you won't get our money.'”
Of course, there were advertisers who understood
Sassy
. Calvin Klein and Guess Jeans were still fans, and the Coast Guard debuted an ad in
Sassy
depicting a female captain whose boyfriend brings her lunch. In fact,
Sassy
often had as many ad pages as did
YM
. But while most magazines were allowed to produce two or three editorial pages per advertisement, Lang didn't want to spend that kind of money, so
Sassy
could produce only one. “So if we had only thirty-five advertising pages, then we had seventy pages total,” says Mary. “If people said, âWell, why aren't we selling on the newsstand?' I'd say, âBecause it's a pamphlet! ' Nobody's going to buy a pamphlet at a newsstand when they can buy this big
YM
,
Cosmo
, whatever.” Newsstand numbers began to drop, and soon, fewer advertisers wanted in.
Sassy
was undoubtedly the underdog when it came to circulationâ
Seventeen
,
YM
, and
Teen
were all in the millions, while
Sassy
's readership had stalled at 800,000 (a bigger audience, it should be noted, than those of many of the next generation of teen magazines). And yet it was more expensive to advertise in
Sassy
than in its competition. In the early years, the magazine had justified the extra cost by touting
Sassy
's high-quality paper stock, bigger size, and high-end photography and design. But after Cheryl and Neill decided to move on to new jobs elsewhere,
Sassy
underwent a series of unsuccessful redesigns. Art director Noël Claro did one in March 1992 that, while cute and zine-y, looked younger than previous incarnations. A 1993 redesign, though overseen by Cheryl, who returned briefly from Australia to work on the project, was boring and uninspired, from the smoothing out of the original paintbrush logo to the white backgrounds on almost all the covers. Mainstream stars like Jennie Garth and Tori Spelling, who were poked fun at in the pages of
Sassy
, suddenly graced its covers. The mandate was to keep the cover lines peppy and upbeat, make sure the model looks happy and approachable, keep the sex lines to a minimum (and small), and make sure the celebrities were plentiful; this was not the way to attract the kind of disaffected outsider girl who would create the next generation of
Sassy
readers. But the covers were battled over between the magazine's business and editorial departments. The end product was a diluted, compromised version of what each camp wanted, which made for a result that made no one happy.
Cohen thinks that the new look ultimately had a devastating effect on the magazine, with the unsophisticated design attracting a younger, less upscale, less coveted demographic: the average age of the
Sassy
reader, and the amount of discretionary
income she made per week, dropped to below the levels of
Seventeen
's readership.
Sassy
no longer stood out as a magazine for older teens, which had been key to its positioning.
In fact, the business concerns were endless. Most of the advertisers wanted to put their money into fashion- and beauty-focused publications, and
Sassy
had a reputation as being issue-oriented. Advertisers long had the mistaken idea that because
Sassy
readers thought of themselves as outside of the norm, they didn't want to buy the products other girls were buying; but if
Sassy
readers didn't want to buy Maybelline's frosty pink lipstick, they may have wanted to buy the red one. And even if they didn't want to buy pink plastic Caboodles makeup kits or Lane cedar chests, they were still avid consumers who wanted to buy Doc Martens and sailor tees to assert their identities. But the insider-y, hip, closed-off world
Sassy
increasingly represented made the magazine unappealing to big corporations. Cohen complained to Lang in a memo that companies thought that
Sassy
was “creating a subgroup of outcasts.” She called the magazine “an elite club of alienated girls.” Many of the magazine's readers would have agreed with her. So, in fact, would Jane: “When I went to the talk show,
Sassy
didn't have quite the clarity of vision. Mary Kaye was sort of a transitional person, and under Christina it definitely became edgier; circulation was lower, however, and the number of people who resubscribed was also lower. I definitely am more âmass' than Christina is, and that's one reason the magazine did start to lose circulation.”
In one undated memo, in a section titled “Offensive Collage,” Cohen takes the editors to task:
Many articles seem to be inflected with anger, negativity, and offensive remarks. This is portrayed in such references as “Do you have a stick firmly lodged up your butt,” and Christina's response to a reader letter, “Eat Me.” Glossary definitions such as “Goob,” meaning to cough up and spit out a ball of mucus from the back of one's throat or “Gadar, [sic]” which is the innate ability to tell at a glance if someone is gay, enabling “you to pinpoint whether an attractive morsel rides in your ranch or not” are inappropriate. One READ IT column reviews this book: “The Story of the Little Mole Who Went in Search of Whodunit,” which is the story of a mole who emerges from his hole to find that another animal has “taken a dump” on his head and so goes in search of the culprit. This subject is unsuitable for a teenage mainstream magazine and offends our advertisers. The same is true for the as yet unmarketed device that allows a woman to stand up and pee. Language such as “This Sucks,” “Bleed, Baby, Bleed,” a reference to menstruation, and “You'd better thank me, bitches,” is offensive. This anger is reflected back to us when we receive and print reader sentiments such as “When
people say, âI'm gonna kick your ass,' they don't kick your ass. They hit you in the face.” Lynn and LaRue from Dugway, Utah, thought this magazine should be rated R. They said, “If you [print] a twelve-year-old's [letter] in your magazine, don't you think twelve-year-olds read it? We can tell by the way that you talk that you are a bunch of imbeciles.” When it's turning off our audience, it's turning off our advertisers.
The
Sassy
editors hated Cohen. Margie remembers the staff putting their faith in one member of the ad staff who they thought understood them. “We were very hung up on this one ad salesman, Mike Fish.” Fish worked primarily with record labels, but the lifeblood of any teen magazine is fashion and beauty advertisers. Fish's clients would not be enough to buoy the magazine, no matter how much the staff liked him.
Sassy
was losing its buzz. Jane, preoccupied with her failing talk show and herself less a source of interest now that
Sassy
had reached its adolescence, wasn't bringing as much attention to the magazine as she used to. Cohen complained in a memo that “Our readers know all the editorsâthe public only knows Jane. We need to saturate the market with all the editors.” The media world never caught on that there was more to
Sassy
than its editor in chief, and Lang wasn't willing to put more money into a PR and marketing budget to rectify the situation, which Mary blames for the demise. “When it ended, it really had more to do with moneyâwhether Lang had the money or didn't want to spend it on
Sassy
âand less to do with advertising,” she says. “If the magazine had been owned by Condé Nast or Hearst and supported in a certain way, I think it would have been fine.”
“There is a formula for consumer magazine success in America,” says Professor David Abrahamson. “You have to come up with a very specific kind of editorial content that is of clear interest to a clear group of people to whom advertisers who tend to advertise in print want to sell products.”
Sassy
solved the first two pointsâit had a clear voice and an audience that advertisers wanted to reachâbut
Sassy
was not the vehicle advertisers wanted to use. Its singular voice was in many ways its downfall, and the decreasing ad pages and shrinking content wore on the staff in ways that only made matters worse.
“Writing, editing, and art direction is a job that's fun but requires a bit of passion. You could do other things and make more money. That's why it's a young person's sport,” Abrahamson continues. “To do that under really contrary circumstances, from a defensive position, is really, really hard to doâthere needs to be nurturing and protection to flourish. Once that shared enthusiasm on the part of editors gets severely dented, it's not too long before the product starts to show it. You can see magazines that are tired. There's no sort of binding energy, nothing animating.”
In September 1993,
Sassy
hired Diane Paylor.
“As
Sassy
's first African American writer, I knew I would be asked to write about issues of color. Who better to spew a little venom about racial prejudice than an everyday victim of it, huh?” Diane wrote in one story.
Sassy
had long been criticized for not being as racially sensitive as it could be. Kim regularly wrote about hip-hop, though it was never covered as much as the indie rock that Christina was partial to. Kim also wrote June 1991's “It's a Black Thing,” about her experience as a white person interacting with the hostile members of Afrocentric black groups. The staff fought to get African-Americans, like Sassiest Girl in America Sala Patterson, on the cover. (The magazine industry has long believed that a black cover model is the death-knell to that month's circulation. But since publications didn't want to appear racist, they would put a black girl on the cover maybe once a year, usually in February, the shortest month and the one that got the smallest circulation numbers, anyway.)
Still, in
Sassy
's pages, race never got as much play as did gender. For Diane's very first issue, the editors conjured up an article that was supposed to illuminate the disparity between blacks and whites. Diane and Mary Ann were both supposed to do regular day-to-day things like shopping at an expensive jewelry store and trying to get a cab at night. The goal was to see how differently Diane was treated because she's black. And a number of times racism was clearly an issueâDiane was falsely told that the store didn't sell men's jewelry, for example. But most of the time she was treated the same way that Mary Ann was. And when she reported back to the
Sassy
staff, they told her to get back out there and try again, because not being treated badly wasn't a story.