Tina Brown

 ( 1953 Births ) 

Brown, however, had the support of New Yorker stalwarts John Updike, Roger Angell, Brendan Gill, Lillian Ross, Calvin Tomkins, Janet Malcolm, Harold Brodkey and Philip Hamburger, as well as newer staffers Adam Gopnik and Nancy Franklin. During her editorship, she let 79 staffers go and engaged 50 new writers and editors, including David Remnick (whom she nominated as her successor), Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane, Jane Mayer, Jeffrey Toobin, Hendrik Hertzberg, Hilton Als, Ken Auletta, Simon Schama, Lawrence Wright, John Lahr, Pamela McCarthy, and executive editor Dorothy Wickenden. Brown introduced the annual fiction issue and the holiday cartoon issue. She also collaborated with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates to devote an issue to the theme Black in America.

Brown broke the magazine's longstanding reluctance to treat photography seriously in 1992, when she invited Richard Avedon to be its first staff photographer. She approved controversial covers, including Edward Sorel's October 1992 image of a punk-rock passenger sprawled in the back seat of an elegant horse-drawn carriage, which may have been Brown's self-mocking riposte to fears that she would downgrade the magazine. A year later Valentine's Day publication of Art Spiegelman's cover of a Jewish man and a Black woman in an embracing kiss, a comment on the mounting racial tensions between Blacks and ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, garnered controversy. Brown appointed Spiegelman's wife Françoise Mouly as the magazine's art editor.

During Brown's tenure, the magazine received four George Polk Awards, five Overseas Press Club Awards, and ten National Magazine Awards, including a 1995 award for General Excellence, the first in the magazine's history. Newsstand sales rose 145 percent. The New Yorkers circulation increased to 807,935 for the second half of 1997, up from 658,916 during the corresponding period in 1992. Critics maintained it was hemorrhaging money, but Newhouse remained supportive, viewing the magazine under Brown as a start-up: "It was practically a new magazine. She added topicality, photography, color. She did what we would have done if we invented The New Yorker from scratch. To do all that was costly. We knew it would be." Under Brown, its economic fortunes improved every year: In 1995 losses were about $17million, in 1996 $14million, and in 1997 $11million.

In 1998, Brown resigned from The New Yorker following an invitation from Harvey Weinstein and Bob Weinstein of Miramax Films (then owned by The Walt Disney Company) to chair Talk Media.

Opinions of Brown's New Yorker tenure varied:

"She had to move fast. She was decisive ... went against the tradition of popular culture unfriendly to the written word. And what was she doing? She was pumping energy and life into a magazine devoted to publishing aesthetically and intellectually demanding writing. She saved The New Yorker," wrote editorial director Hendrik Hertzberg.

Writer Adam Gopnik said, "The magazine will remain smarter and braver—more open to argument, and incomparably less timid—for her presence here."

"I assume we can now look forward to Miramax becoming a shallow, celebrity-obsessed money loser she made The New Yorker," wrote Randy Cohen.

"She is the best magazine editor alive. What more can I say?" said writer Michael Kinsley.

"The most important thing, I think, has been Brown's effort to bring together the intellectual material and the streets," said writer Stanley Crouch. "When she was in charge, despite all the complaints from the old New Yorker crowd, one got a much stronger sense of the variousness of American society than one did under the editorship of perhaps the rightfully sainted Mr. Shawn."

Talk Media formed a joint venture with Hearst Magazines for Talk magazine, a monthly compendium of news and culture, in February 1999. Brown worked with the book division's editor in chief Jonathan Burnham and acquiring editor Susan Mercandetti. She recalled in November 2017 at the time of allegations of sexual assault being made against Harvey Weinstein: "Strange contracts pre-dating us would suddenly surface, book deals with no deadline attached authored by attractive or nearly famous women."

Staff members included editors Sam Sifton, Danielle Mattoon, Jonathan Mahler and Virginia Heffernan. Jake Tapper and Tucker Carlson provided political columns. Notable articles included the first US profile of Osama bin Laden before 9/11, Tom Stoppard's autobiographical piece about his Jewish roots that was the origin of his 2020 play Leopoldstadt and Tucker Carlson's revealing profile of then Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush.

An anticipated magazine launch party at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York City was thwarted by mayor Rudy Giuliani, who reportedly felt it was not an appropriate use of the site. The event was moved to Liberty Island, where on 2 August 1999, more than 800 political leaders, writers, and Hollywood notables, including Madonna, Salman Rushdie, Demi Moore, and George Plimpton, arrived by barge for a picnic dinner at the feet of the Statue of Liberty under thousands of Japanese lanterns and a Grucci fireworks display. An interview with Hillary Clinton in the first issue claimed that the abuse her husband suffered as a child led to his adult philandering. The Washington Post reported that at times, " Talk seemed more interested in promoting such Miramax stars as Gwyneth Paltrow than in politics."

Despite having achieved a circulation of 670,000 Talk magazine's publication was halted in January 2002 in the wake of the advertising recession following the 9/11 attacks. It was Brown's first very public failure, but she said she had no regrets about embarking on the project. She told Charlotte Edwardes of The Telegraph in 2002: "My reputation rests on four magazines—three great successes, one that was a great experiment. I don't feel in any way let down. No big career doesn't have one flame out in it and there's nobody more boring than the undefeated."

Politico estimated that Brown had "bombed through some $50million in 2 years" on the failed venture, an assessment that did not include revenue from the book division. Talk Miramax Books flourished as a boutique publishing house until it was detached from Miramax in 2005 and folded into Hyperion at Disney. Out of 42 books published during Brown's time, 11 appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list, including Leadership by Giuliani, by Queen Noor of Jordan, Stolen Lives by Malika Oufkir, Experience by Martin Amis and Madam Secretary by Madeleine Albright.

A $1million contract settlement in 2002 ended Brown's involvement in Talk Media.