Posts Tagged: Tina Brown
11

The Real Numbers Behind 'Newsweek'

You won't want to miss this thorough WWD report on life inside Newsweek. It's mostly what you'd expect from Tina Brown: the magazine is constantly torn up, resulting in exhaustion and money burn, and, while some enjoy the thrill—being around a Tina turnaround joint is a great kind of rollercoaster!—the anonymous employee quotes are brutal. (Sample: "You’re exposed relentlessly to the truth that we’re not putting out a good magazine.")

In the long term, who knows what'll happen? For one thing, we know that Tina Brown will spend huge amounts of money until the checkbook stops delivering it. The figure always bandied about is that now NewsBeast loses [...]

20

The New 'Newsweek'

It's here! It's Tina Brown's Newsweek! There it is, between the huge amount of word-free space and a 2/3rds of a page devoted to a photograph of a shoe: Harvey Weinstein and Hillary Clinton as hot topics, with editorial buttressing from the minds of Larry Summers and the recently unemployed Kathleen Parker and Joanne Lipman. Mmm, it's like soaking in a nice warm bath of a comfortable yesterday—a happy, mature place of sort-of kind-of powerful people (the kind of people who have "power" at Michael's restaurant, or certain overpriced bistros in D.C.) explaining things simply and calmly (and sometimes correctly), with the occasional stroppy quote on [...]

12

Tina Brown Pleased With Glass Ceiling-Smashing

"I'm the first woman editor of Newsweek, which is very exciting. You know that in the 1970s, the women editors of Newsweek launched a lawsuit against the management because there were hardly any women doing anything of any consequence on the magazine. And women's liberation took over and they hired the great lawyer, Eleanor Norton, and they went to battle for their rights. I feel that it—you know, a merger has created what the lawsuit couldn't." What a difference forty years makes.

28

Tina Brown, Two Years In, Declares Age of FUN, Serial Commas

The Daily Beast turns two years old today and its honcho interviews herself.

You have been accused of having your finger on the Zeitgeist. So where is it located right now? What do people want to read and consume? Sexy brain food. Give us something to make us smarter, but for God's sake don't make it feel like work. People are in such a glum frame of mind they are looking for confidence, audacity, practicality, and FUN.

8

Tired, Emotional Hillary Clinton Becoming As Candid As Joe Biden

Will this be our outrage for the day? Quite possibly! God forbid the Secretary of State cast aspersions on the cleanest, fairest, least manipulated election this country has ever seen. On foreign soil, no less! Tina Brown was right: Bitch needs to hit the gym.

16

Tina Brown, Fanfiction And Princess Diana: Nine Observations

1. Before we proceed, we might all need to take a moment to acknowledge that we've reached the point in our culture where former editors of the New Yorker are writing fanfiction. Publicly, I mean; who knows what William Shawn scribbled in his most private notebooks, and in some sense who wouldn’t want to know, how many miles to Babylon, etc. But still. Fanfiction, in a “news magazine.”

2. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with fanfiction qua fanfiction. I’m not into it myself, but I read serial killer profiles at 3 a.m. when I can’t sleep, so no judgment. But the communications scholar Henry Jenkins has an awfully neat [...]

29

Snuck Into National Book Awards

i am at the National Book Awards at the Cipriani on Wall Street and i am standing fifteen feet away from Tina Brown. Tina Brown is sitting at her table and she just finished her dinner and i am waiting with my friends Mike and Nate to interview her to ask her how many times she has presented Tom Wolfe with an award, but right now she looks like she's having a pretty intense conversation with some old dude and if i interrupted her conversation she probably wouldn't do my interview. a cater waiter just walked by carrying some plates with slices of pie on them and the pie [...]

67

The Awl To Merge With Any Magazine That'll Have Us!

David Cho: I love it when Tina Brown takes a metaphor too far. Choire Sicha: SO GOOD. David Cho: We should buy a magazine. Which ones are available? Choire Sicha: Alex and I have a short list. David Cho: A VERY SHORT LIST? Choire Sicha: Oh heh. Well, we were thinking… Barely Legawl? Choire Sicha: Or what about Detawls? David Cho: Hmm. Choire Sicha: Wawlpaper??? David Cho: I guess that would be appropriate. Cookieawl. Am I doing this right??? Choire Sicha: …. Choire Sicha: Well, I also really want Monocawl. David Cho: Tawlk. There's one for you. Choire Sicha: Ouch.

43

Tina Brown on Building a Subculture of Impoverished Writers

Here's Tina Brown, from January, 2009: "For a while last year, the downsized people I know went around pretending they enjoyed the 'freedom' and 'variety' of doing 'a whole lot of interesting things.' Twelve months later, nobody bothers with that cover story anymore. Everyone knows what it actually feels like, this penny-ante slog of working three times as hard for the same amount of money (if you're lucky) or a lot less (if you're not). Minus benefits, of course…. The managers of all these disintegrating companies tend to be mesmerized by the notion that everyone can now be hired cheap-that everyone is slave labor." And then there's Tina [...]

1

Conde Nast, Sort Of Revealed!

Hey, we read that big article on S.I. Newhouse and family, the owners of Conde Nast, in New York magazine!

11

How Is Tina Brown Like George Washington?

And for whatever reason, like we all needed a reason, there's a profile of Tina Brown! What is a Tina Brown? "'Tina’s a revolutionary leader,' [Hendrik] Hertzberg says by way of explaining why she left The New Yorker. 'Revolutionary leaders go wrong when they stay too long. George Washington went back to the farm; Fidel Castro didn’t.'"

Now, I'm no student of American history, mostly because my high school history teacher was so depressed and endrunkened that he committed suicide not long after my American history semester ended, but, basically, George Washington retired twice. (To the "farm," which… calling that a "farm" is a stretch. I think we [...]

14

The Weekly Beast: Doing the Math

The Daily Beast loses something like $200,000 a week. Newsweek loses around $500,000 a week. (Actually more like $538,000—that's $28 million a year.) Put the two entities together and you're losing a million dollars every ten days or so. Sure, there's some cash incoming—Newsweek has $165 million in annual revenue! Which is a ton of money… almost none of which comes from Newsweek.com. Making sense of the properties online is the most confusing order of the merger. (What will be done to the print product seems pretty obvious to most.) Particularly given that Newsweek.com has two to three times the traffic of the Beast. Here's [...]

12

The Huff-Beast: Lady-Moguls Decry Sexism, Narrative

In which Tina Brown and Arianna Huffington pretend to IM with each other.

65

The Awl Turns Five Months And Sixteen Days

Today as, unlike other sites, The Awl marks no sort of anniversary at all, co-founder and Associate Editorial Director Alex Balk talks about the first five months and sixteen days' surprises, obsessive commenters, print's premature obit, Sarah Palin, his enormous penis… and what's next for the site.

So how was your first five months and sixteen days at The Awl?

5

Tina Brown And CEOs: Deep In Denial About The Death Of Publishing

Book Expo America is upon the epically embattled publishing industry once again. Things really heat up today and tomorrow-this is at the Javits Center, over at the ass end of Manhattan-with author signings and discussions like "Book Reviews 2010: What Will They Look Like." But the most attended event at the slower Thursday session was a panel of four publishing CEOs. It was moderated by former New Yorker editor, founder and editor of The Daily Beast, and ACTUAL BOOK AUTHOR Tina Brown. Elegant in pink, Brown's role was Emissary of New Media-"I now run an Internet site," she said helpfully-to the lovable but philistine Print Masses.