Remaking the news

Tina Brown’s return to print media with Newsweek surprised many. Here, she explains her plans for the loss-making title The last time Tina Brown launched a magazine – Talk in 1999 – she held a celebrity-stuffed party on an island off Manhattan where the fireworks were bigger, louder and longer than those at Rupert Murdoch’s wedding just a few weeks later. To celebrate her first issue as editor-in-chief of Newsweek, earlier this month, Brown ditched the party idea altogether, instead inviting some of the world’s richest, poorest and most-oppressed women to talk about their rights in a midtown Manhattan hotel for the Women In The World summit. The Murdochs were there too to discuss China, their marriage having outlived Talk by a whole decade. The magazine cost its backers a rumoured $100m (£62m) over two seemingly spendthrift years. After its closure in early 2002, Brown hosted a chat show and wrote a biography of Princess Diana before setting up the webzine, the Daily Beast, in 2008. The past decade has seen an explosion of online social networking that now makes celebrity parties seem, well, old school, and the print media decimated by websites from Google to Gawker and the Huffington Post. But what hasn’t changed since 1999 is Brown’s ability to attract headlines, both good and bad. Brown is catnip to print journalists and the more vicious bloggers. When the Beast team merged with the even more loss-making Newsweek last November, Gawker ran a much-read piece comparing Brown with a hagfish, “a blind, slimy, deepwater eel-like creature that darts into the orifices of its prey and devours them, alive, from the inside”. Brown is, inevitably, dismissive of these attacks.”Snark is the medium of the day,” she says when we meet over a hotel breakfast (egg white omelette with bacon and butterless toast). In her transatlantic, staccato voice, she says she hasn’t read the stories anyway. “I don’t have Google alert because it just distracts the brain. At the end of the day, we have bigger things to worry about than that, quite frankly. We have a magazine to remake.” The task she faces in remaking Newsweek is one of the biggest of a 35-year career that has included taking on a failing Tatler when she was just 25, as well as editing Vanity Fair (1984 to 1992) and the New Yorker (1992 to 1998). In a world where advertising and circulation revenues have plummeted and the future of news magazines looks dire, Newsweek’s losses are estimated at more than $20m a year . Sidney Harman, a 92-year-old technology mogul paid $1 for the 78-year-old magazine last summer. He contacted Brown soon after. So, the question is, after extolling the virtues of the 24/7 nature of the internet for the past two years, why would Brown and her billionaire backer Barry Diller return to print? Manhattan gossip suggests Diller simply wants to distance himself from the loss-making Beast, but he has a funny way of showing it, if so. As well as continuing to fund the merged firm, he will provide office space in his new Frank Gehry-designed offices in the next month. Brown says of her two new co-owners: “I’ve got two guys who’ve expressed their commitment and no one expects it to be quick. I think I’m much safer with them than I

Posted by on March 27, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.