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FROM THE FRONTLINES :: STEVE COHN
End of Jane Started with the 2005 "End" of Jane Pratt
 Jane's July 9 closure by Condé Nast president/ceo Chuck Townsend culminated two very difficult years for the magazine. When Jane Pratt launched her namesake in 1997, she carried over that "in your face" panache for young women that for the short term worked so well with teens a decade earlier at Sassy. Stayed that way at Jane for about eight years, with the best evidence of corporate confidence coming in 2001, when CN, which acquired Jane with its 1999 purchase of Fairchild Publications, folded the much more established Mademoiselle.But in July 2005, then-Fairchild president Mary Berner (now Reader's Digest Association president/ceo) dismissed Pratt because the "Jane as Jane" formula was getting tired. (Similar in the 1990s with "Jane as Sassy," which folded in 1996.) Ad pages throughout second-half 2005 and first-half 2006 were comparatively -30% and worse, and the 700,000 rate base was tiny in a women's beauty-/fashion-magazine world of 1 million-plus. That current Jane editor-in-chief Brandon Holley and vp/publisher Carlos Lamadrid (both 2005 hires) could not successfully fix the magazine is no reflection on them. That Holley, a protégée of the late GQ editor-in-chief Art Cooper, was highly regarded during her 2001-2005 Ellegirl editor-in-chief stint (magazine folded in April 2006) was seen both in her recruitment by Berner and in her being a 2003 Advertising Age "Woman to Watch." Lamadrid had turned Men's Journal around (2005 ad pages were +14%) before reuniting with Berner (he is a past publisher of Fairchild's DNR/Footwear News), and it would not be surprising if he eventually reunites with her again at Reader's Digest. "Reuniting" could also come with Kent Brownridge, Lamadrid's MJ boss at Wenner Media, after the Brownridge-partnered Quadrangle Capital's expected September closing of its circa-$250 million purchase of Maxim/Stuff/Blender from Felix Dennis. More Steve Cohn
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