New York Times Magazine
‘Don’t come here unless you’re balls to the wall!’ one of Tina Brown’s employees once warned. “So now we call it ‘B to the W!’ We say, ‘Is he B to the W?’” says the Newsweek and Daily Beast editor. “Because otherwise someone comes in and says, ‘Well, two days a week I have to teach at N.Y.U. …’ And we say, ‘Not B to the W!’” She adds: “I’m not very good with people who aren’t committed.”
On the failure of Talk magazine:
“Talk was a very good magazine, it really was. And I only realized how really good it was when I was preparing for Newsweek. It was just the wrong setup. Miramax wasn’t a publishing company, and Hearst was the wrong publisher. Actually I think it would have worked better as a weekly. And now I have a weekly.”
On her Conde Nast “spending spree”:
“I always had a budget at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. People tend to think I had some kind of free checkbook. There was a reason I was given The New Yorker after Vanity Fair, and it wasn’t because I’d gone and put Vanity Fair into the red.”
On Newsweek:
“What I love about Newsweek, it’s truly a global magazine. People keep showing up — we discovered we have a Japanese correspondent! That’s kind of thrilling — there is a Japanese Newsweek, and there’s a very good Polish Newsweek, all these global editions, we have a great Moscow bureau chief. It’s thrilling to feel the global reach of Newsweek, because there are very few brands left that have that kind of traction.
* Brown in 2008: I’d hate to have to be in the magazine world now
* Brown in 2007: I miss being a journalist and always think of articles I’d assign
* September 2003: Brown in talks to write Washington Post Style section column
* March 2003: “Topic A with Tina Brown” debuts on CNBC (the show didn’t last long)
