Who is this lady??

It's quite impressive, really. In a post titled "Too Tired to Name-Drop,"  XOJane editor in chief Jane Pratt liveblogged on her iPhone yesterday during a conversation she was having in a tea shop.

Which seems kind of...rude? Liveblogging during a conversation? Especially since Ms. Pratt could have used the phone to look up the name of the very famous actress she was talking to. Instead, she just gave readers clues and asked them to solve the mystery for her.

What is the world coming to? That nice cool woman from the Sopranos and Nurse Betty -- the fantastic actress and fellow single mom I know from years ago -- is talking to me in the tea place and I can't use her name in conversation, even though she is using mine, because I can't remember it. Something with an E? Don't you dislike when that happens? I wind up saying "honey" way too much in these instances. As in, "Bye Jane!" "Bye honey!!" Ugh.

Ms. Pratt knew the person she was talking to was a famous actress who was on the Sopranos and Nurse Jackie. Ms. Pratt knew the woman's name began with the letter "E." She also knew that the woman was a single mother and a friend of hers from a while back. But she just couldn't think of the lady's name, because the former Sassy editor was too tired (and too busy using her phone to blog), because she doesn't drink caffeine except for kombucha and she spent all last night at Courtney Love's house (whose name she can definitely remember). Oh well.

Anyway, what do you do when you can't remember someone's name? (And who is this cool lady I'm talking to?) Good morning, y'all!

This is like a kid's TV show, where Dora the Explorer waits a beat so we can yell out the answer. It's EDIE FALCO! Yay!

We admit, we are a little obsessed by Jane Pratt's creative use of phone-blogging. It's so informal! Now, someone show her how to use Google on this damn thing.

Tavi Gevinson, thestylerookie.com

Teen fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson has decided not to launch her web magazine Rookie under the umbrella of Jane Pratt's partnership with SAY Media, xoJane.com, reports WWD.

Perhaps our ambivalence toward clothes had prevented us from understanding the full extent of Ms. Gevinson's genius, but to us this decision signals some serious savvy.

SAY Media is a web publishing company that provides advertising sales services to help SAY "creators" leverage their "influence" into lucrative "brand experiences," including advertisements created by the creators, SAY told us back when xoJane.com launched. They trade in the slick content commodification that makes people who care about ideas and writing miserable.

From the SAY site:

"Connect is an influencer driven program that syndicates brand experiences across a tailored collection of sites and communities, anchored in conversations and passionate voices."

"Real voices make brand programs personal and conversational."

"Advertising is content."

Maybe SAY Media is the future of getting paid to write. If it is a good fit for any site, its xoJane.com, which is almost entirely voice-driven personal narratives ("Everything we write is an exclusive, because it only happened to us") that SAY thinks makes readers feel like they can really trust whatever shampoo brand they're advertising.

Unlike xoJane's dishy older sister take,  its the inexperience that allows Ms. Gevinson to describes things adults already know about with sweetly unchecked emotion and (what feels to us like) revelatory simplicity. She doesn't sound like a shampoo commercial, not even a subversive viral anti-commercial commercial. She's more memorable for her insight and her perspective than her voice.

Ms. Gevinson added that instead of partnering with a corporate publisher she's hired her own design and sales team.

“It was just that I want to have full control, and it’s important to me that we’re independent, not so that we can be indie and ‘down with the Man,’ but because I find a lot of comfort knowing that it’s all in my control," she told WWD.

We're extrapolating, here, but it seems like Ms. Gevinson's Google-driven love of the 90s (which she didn't live through, as we love to point out) yielded not just a Courtney Love haircut, but a Gen Xer's suspicion of marketers and a DIYers entrepreneurial wherewithal.

And now that we know she's such a boss, we selfishly hope she outgrows her interest in writing about clothes. She's good at writing about other stuff too.

Jane Pratt (Getty Images)

Magazine impresario Jane Pratt did not speak at last night's tribute to her departed magazine, Sassy--despite the presence of marquee speaker Tavi Gevinson, the youthful dynamo collaborating on a future venture with Ms. Pratt (about which Ms. Gevinson spoke last night!). Per another speaker, Marisa Meltzer, "she was out of town on vacation" from her compelling duties managing website xoJane. "She sent a video."

What does it take to command Ms. Pratt's presence? Well, in a fifty-percent markup on the rate of the supermodels Ms. Pratt's magazines once disdained, Ms. Pratt doesn't get out of bed for less than $15,000.

We called the speaker's bureau representing Ms. Pratt and told her we wanted her to deliver a brief address to a small group a month from now, in New York. We were just interested in hearing about Sassy, we said, when asked if there were any alternate speakers in whom we might be interested. We were quoted a fee of fifteen grand--because Ms. Pratt is local.

That's fine, but can we choose her outfit?

JK. It sounds like every other job listing ever.

"You must be a self-starter with a strong attention to detail who works well with a team."

The "About Our Company" is equally nondescript: "First came Sassy, then came Jane, now Janepratt.com is coming! We're an online magazine that is in the process of preparing for our official launch with Jane Pratt as our editor-in-chief."

In July, Pratt introduced JanePratt.com, which said "Coming This Fall."  Then in November she picked up Gevinson and it now says "Coming Soon."

Apparently they didn't find everything they're looking for in Gevinson's open call when the venture was first announced.

"If you want to be a part, email us. MagazineSubmissionsAreFun@gmail.com, because we haven't decided on a title yet," she wrote.

And apparently Jane Pratt is holding her ground on the name front!

kstoeffel@observer.com :: @kstoeffel

Gevinson revealed the plans for the site in a note posted on her blog Friday. 

Pratt's prior magazine ventures Jane and Sassy were both praised as antidotes to the shallow materialism of other women's titles. Jane and Sassy helped Pratt develop a devoted following among women who came of age during the late nineties and early aughts. Jane began in 1997, it was named after its creator. Pratt left her eponymous magazine in 2005 and cited "wanderlust to do new things" as the reason for her departure. Jane folded almost exactly two years later. 

Sassy, which ran from 1988 until 1996, brought Pratt together with her teenage protege. Gevinson was born the year before Sassy ceased publication, but she became familiar with the magazine through back issues and blogged about the need for a similar title for her generation. Pratt found out about Gevinson's admiration for Sassy and sent the young blogger an email. The pair eventually met in person and hashed out the idea for "a magazine for an audience of wallflowerly teenage girls."

According to Gevinson, the new project won't be an attempt to recreate either of Pratt's other glossies. 

"Of course, it won't be Sassy (or the rebirth of Sassy, or Sassy 2.0) and nor do we want it to be … The world has changed a bit in the past 15 or so years and that whole Internet thing happened, and this world calls for something different," Gevinson wrote.

For now, the pint-sized aspiring editrix said she could only offer "vague details" about the project, because it's still in an early planning phase. Gevinson and Pratt are hoping to move forward quickly with their as-yet-untitled magazine. In her note about the venture, Gevinson asked writers who are interested in being (unpaid) contributors  to send her samples of their work by the end of next week.

"We wanna get moving!" Gevinson wrote. 

The article also features an amusing vignette about Ms. Pratt's editorial commitment: "[S]he didn't stop working even when her water broke. 'I was in the middle of editing and I wanted to finish,' she says. 'I really did think that I could do it all.' Staffers, including her managing editor and assistant, trooped over to Mount Sinai hospital, where they kept drafting Jane's editor's letter and choosing photos for a fashion story until he doctors kicked them out."

On Monday Ms. Pratt launched xoJane.com with SAY Media, an online branding and publishing company, which acquired the pet-owner social media sites Dogster and Catster in April. xoJane.com is the company's first custom site. SAY Media president Troy Young told Off the Record that Ms. Pratt embodies SAY's vision of "passion-based media," which, coupled with some smart branding and blown up to a large scale, he believes is the ticket for success 2.0.

"Audience has to be earned now," Mr. Young told Off the Record. Ms. Pratt earned her audience with a chatty personal writing style and her monthly diary columns, which made minor celebrities out of herself and her staffers. 

"I felt like I was on a TV show," said former Jane editor Jauretsi Saizarbitoria, who was hired as an editor based on her experience as a Details promotions director, D.J. and overall cool girl. "Jane was the star, and the rest of us were surrounding characters." Of course, when actual reality TV cameras came knocking, Ms. Pratt turned them down. She already had the only platform she needed. 

Social media came along shortly thereafter, pushing all web editorial content even further toward the personal, confessional and incendiary.

"I read my daughter's Facebook page," Mr. Young said, sounding a little horrified. "Publishing and advertising have to live in that world."

Like ingratiating party guests, xoJane.com bloggers have already endeared themselves to readers with slightly combative intimacy. Readers already know that Cat the beauty blogger's parents were disengaged when she was a child and that Eliza monitors her husband's bottle of lubricant. Of course, all that also means comments, "likes" and advertisers' highly prized "engagement."

Acknowledging that banner ads are no longer a profitable strategy, Mr. Young told Off The Record that SAY brings content-branding strategies to the table, but they require Ms. Pratt and staff to dissolve the traditional magazine "church and state" divide between editorial and advertising. A "polisher" will work with Ms. Pratt's editorial staff and SAY's creative studios to bring content into the ads, creating what Mr. Young calls "ad experiences." He says xoJane is launching with big advertisers Covergirl, Unilever, and Lord & Taylor, although no campaigns or branded content were visible at press time.

According to Ms. Saizarbitoria, church and state never existed for Ms. Pratt, because her personality, or, rather, her personal brand, was the compelling editorial peg for advertisers.

"She would have to fly to the Midwest for meetings with cosmetic companies," Ms. Saizarbitoria remembered. "It was a little bit dog and pony show."

Ms. Pratt still seems willing to saddle up. One of the site's more unique features is a stream of Ms. Pratt's iPhone text messages and e-mails. Videos of her daughter, pleas for pizza from giddily exhausted co-workers, and text messages from Michael Stipe make up the feed, which dates back for a year of the site's development. 

For this Off The Record was thankful, because it answered some of the questions we had prepared for Ms. Pratt. Is the precocious and '90s-inclined fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson still involved? Will there still be a print magazine? Yes! And yes! They have e-mailed about submissions for a magazine.  

And also, why had she had not gotten back to us about said questions, despite green lights from a series of SAY employees? There in Ms. Pratt's inbox was an e-mail from the flack we'd been working with, with The Observer in the subject line.

And just below it: "Ignore... you can't talk to any New York papers before The New York Times."

kstoeffel@observer.com

Mandy Stadtmiller (Patrick McMullan)

On August 6, Mandy Stadtmiller started as a deputy editor at Jane Pratt’s women’s-interest site xoJane—the date was marked “Job Starts” in her iCal—but that wasn’t the biggest thing that happened to her that day. XoJane had just lost one of its main attractions in beauty bloggger trainwreck Cat Marnell, but happily Ms. Stadtmiller was able to generate considerable attention of her own. In the morning, she published a piece entitled “I Inspired a ‘Bad’ Version of Myself on Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom.” The SEO-enabled headline was no joke; the piece detailed Ms. Stadtmiller’s brief romantic relationship with Mr. Sorkin. The movie and television writer had written into the show a hard-charging gossip reporter character he told Ms. Stadtmiller he was calling “Bad Mandy.”

The emails between the pair are included in the piece—Ms. Stadtmiller published screenshots. “It was a choice that changed that relationship forever,” she told Off the Record over calamari and Diet Cokes at a steakhouse near xoJane’s NoMad offices. “And it was the right choice to make ... I obviously recognized that he’s not going to like it. But I chose to crucify myself and paint him as kindly as possible.”

“I heard from him two times after the piece,” she went on. “The first time, he was very nice. The second time, he was very pissed.”

The former New York Post scribe knows how to play a story for all it’s worth—especially when it’s about her own experience. She published stories at the tabloid about a night with America’s first legal male prostitute and undergoing the New York Jets cheerleaders’ training regimen, as well as a dating column, “About Last Night” (“We kiss a little, but it’s the holding that sends shivers down my spine.”).

This first-person, self-as-news approach is perfect for xoJane: the site’s exclusives are derived from the fact that they happened to the staff. With her first-day story of ending up on the small screen thanks to an Oscar-winning cad of an ex, Ms. Stadtmiller fit in immediately; she’s since written about masturbating to Paul Ryan and worrying that all her friendships are “transactional.”

Ms. Stadtmiller’s tenure at the Post began in 2005 and ended this February, when the writer chose to leave and announced plans to publish a roman á clef, entitled News Whore, which she works on over the weekends. She insisted that she will not burn any bridges—“I do not enjoy ruining lives ... If I’m writing about doing a line of blow at my desk with a Fox News reporter, not naming him is a classier way to do it!” Even the title, News Whore, isn’t meant to be taken at face value. “I’m positioning it the way the Post would position it. ‘Slutty, Crazy Girl Tells All!’”

The Post was ultimately not for her, due to its reliance on the sort of easily digested narrative that makes the morning commute pass quickly. “It’s this black-white, hero-villain, News Corp. storyline.” Those looking for dirt on Rupert Murdoch may be disappointed: Ms. Stadtmiller never tapped a phone or anything of the sort. The misdeeds here are subtler. “Did I feel like I had to crucify people just to have an angle? I did.” (On that note, she counts The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm among her favorite books.)

As a character in the xoJane cast, Ms. Stadtmiller may soon get the chance to appear on television; Ms. Pratt is mulling the possibility of an xoJane reality show. The editor published a screenshot of her inbox depicting an email from an executive assistant with the truncated headline “Context for Tomorrow’s Reality Sh ...”

“There’s been a lot of different interest, explained Ms. Stadtmiller, “and there’s a likelihood that it’ll happen. For Jane, if it was done the right way, it’s clear that it would make a fun reality show. It’s in progress, and it’s been fun to come on board with that in the works.”

As Jane Pratt told Buzzfeed’s Amy Odell, she’d been taking meetings and saw her newsroom as a good fit. “In hiring, I did feel like I was casting a soap opera or reality show.”

Ms. Stadtmiller, who read Ms. Pratt’s Sassy as a young woman, showed us a text on her own phone. It was from a childhood friend from San Diego, about working with the provocative editor: “I can’t believe you are living our dream.”

(via Instagram)

SAY Media execs think Jane Pratt's xoJane will be just fine without star persona Cat Marnell. But will the next beauty editor get Ms. Pratt's name tagged downtown? Also, who volunteers to throw up "JONAH LEHRER + DAVID REMNICK?" Eh? Eh? [WWD]

Layoffs hit RollingStone.com (again) because Wenner Media is (finally) integrating its print and digital operations. Managing editor Evie Nagy and associate editor Matthew Perpetua are among those who are leaving. [Poynter]

Former Ethicist Ariel Kaminer is back on Times Metro, covering higher ed. [Capital NY]

New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel still figuring out Twitter. [Twitter]

New York Times likes former public editor Daniel Okrent's play. [NY Times]

Were some Egyptian news outlets led to believe Hosni Mubarak was dead in order to facilitate his move from prison to a hospital? We can't imagine why else someone would use the hedgy term "clinically dead," anyway.  [NY Times]

Tedious music industry types berate honest NPR intern. [NY Times]

The New York Post quietly scaled back its iPad paywall. [Forbes]

Details curated three special editions of Bespoke Post, which is like Birchbox for boys. (Sister magazine Glamour partnered up with Birchbox recently too.) [Details]

Ms. Marnell, right, in February.

xoJane.com beauty writer Cat Marnell has left Jane Pratt's site after refusing to kick her extremely well documented drug habit. The former Lucky beauty editor recently returned from rehab, as mandated by xoJane.com parent company SAY Media, but sources told The New York Post she was still high all the time.

Ms. Marnell wrote Page Six a "Why I Quit" letter so beautiful it really puts that Goldman Sachs guy to shame.

“I’m always on drugs. [...] Look, I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book, which is what I’m doing next. [...] Drug addicts undeniably bring editorial black magic to the table like nobody else, but obviously we make the worst staffers. [...] We can fake it [for a time . . . before we turn into coddled emotional vampire nightmares.”

We miss her already.