Tina Brown: 'I'd Hate to Be a Magazine Editor Now'

Tina Brown and Cathie Black shared a microscope slide for three years as partners in Talk magazine, but you'd never know it from watching them together. The Daily Beast editor in chief and the Hearst president -- so similar in age, haircut and last name -- shared a stage for half an hour at ContentNext's EconWomen conference this afternoon without the ill-fated pop culture magazine's name ever passing their lips.

It finally took an uncouth reporter (cough, cough) to get them to address the elephant in the room: From the vantage point of the present, can they see any way could Talk have survived?

"The massive apparatus of putting out a magazine is just so onerous," said Brown. "It did feel, even then, and that was four or five years ago now, it was already a sort of heavy burden.

"But I think, in fact, and we differ on this, it was really breaking through at the time. We had taken the time to get it right, and it was actually a really good magazine in the last six months of its life."

When it was Black's turn to talk, she suggested that Talk hadn't really died after all: "The Daily Beast is almost Talk in a way. All those things you wrote and said about The Daily Beast is exactly what I think you used to say about Talk -- 'the conversation of the day' or something like that."

Certainly, Brown doesn't sound very nostalgic for her days in the print world.

"I have to say I think I'd be handicapped if I was linked to a magazine," she said at one point. And later, she elaborated, "In my month's experience editing The Daily Beast, I am so excited by it, so enthralled by it, so kind of invigorated by it that it does make me realize the great opportunities of this digital world. And I have to say I would hate to have to be in the magazine world right now. It's a really tough time to be a magazine editor, trying to compete, in a sense with that pace and that exhilaration and the multimedia nature [of the web]."

Other highlights from their Q&A:

-With Cosmogirl shut down, is Town & Country now in the hot seat at Hearst? Black said that she was at a budget meeting for the luxury title today, and also singled it out as a magazine that probably doesn't have much of a future on the web: "Town & Country, its life is not going to be in the digital space. In terms of ad revenue, it's just too small."

-On the other hand, Black said that the new magazine Hearst launched in partnership with the Food Network is off to a strong start: She learned today that more than 50 percent of copies distributed to Barnes & Noble stores have already been sold.

-Brown asked Black, a former publisher of USA Today, whether she thinks newspapers will become "extinct." Black's answer: "I don't think we will use the word 'newspaper' any longer. We're going to have to think about it as news and content distribution. So we'll have to morph the content to where we may not care how the news -- where it comes and what variety of devices it comes on."

-Brown showed that she was still new to the world of web economics when she asked which of Hearst's websites "makes the most money."

"It depends on what you mean by making money," Black responded, to titters. She did say, however, that Heart's digital operations will bring in $100 million in revenue this year, much of it through online subscription sales.

• Cost of the Bailout: $7 Trillion and Counting
• Cheap Chic: Even Big Spenders Are Spending Less
• Lawmakers Press Executives to Disclose Their Pay
• Credit Crunched: A Special Report on Wall Street Chaos