I will tell you it cost $42 million just to print Newsweek. Before you’ve even engaged one writer, or one copy editor, or one picture editor. Forty-two million dollars.

Long, wide-ranging interview of Tina Brown by Michael Kinsley.
posted by Chrysostom on Nov 20, 2012 - 48 comments

'You could wind up with a page only about porn, executions, and Sarah Palin every day.' A New Republic profile of no-longer-bowtied Tucker Carlson as he launches The Daily Caller, a 'right-leaning Huffington Post.'

It may be hard to remember now, staring back through the thick haze of cable-news smackdowns, but, before Carlson embarked on a TV career--and, at various points, even during that TV career--he was a great writer and reporter. His 1999 profile* of George W. Bush for Tina Brown’s short-lived Talk painted a portrait of the then-Texas governor--stubborn, profane, callow--that should have told voters everything they needed to know about why he would be such a terrible president. The piece he wrote for Esquire about traveling to Africa with Sharpton, Cornel West, and other civil rights activists was at once viciously hilarious and bracingly humane, like David Foster Wallace’s or Michael Lewis’s best reportage. At The Weekly Standard, where he worked for much of the 1990s, he was one of the rare writers less consumed with scoring political points than producing quality journalism. [more inside]
posted by shakespeherian on Feb 18, 2010 - 72 comments

It was the media party of the decade. It was planned by the king of parties, Robert Isabell, who died last month. Although thrown to celebrate the birth of Talk Magazine, little did the attendees know, that this was the night print media began to die. “I was aware it was a historic night,” Ms. Brown said. “We were on a boat and I was with Natasha Richardson. We were talking and laughing, looking at the lights of the twin towers. And then a big wave came over the side of the boat and soaked us both. Now Natasha is gone, the towers are gone. It’s very, very sad, but I am very excited by this new world we are heading into.”
posted by Xurando on Aug 3, 2009 - 22 comments

Talk Magazine finished. After months of speculation the Miramax-affiliated magazine, run by Tina Brown (former editor of the New Yorker), has finally been axed. Talk joins Mirabella, Brill's Content, and many other big-budget mags to have been killed in the last year. If even a magazine backed by a movie house can't pay its bills, who's next?
posted by arielmeadow on Jan 18, 2002 - 23 comments