Self-Professed 'Dinosaur' Tina Brown to Turn Beast Stories Into Books

Is Tina Brown suddenly the future?

The New York Times' Motoko Rich reported yesterday that Brown, the editor and founder (with Barry Diller) of the Daily Beast, will be partnering with the Perseus Books Group to form Beast Books, an imprint for quickie e-books and paperbacks.

Brown told the Times, "There is a real window of interest when people want to know something. And that window slams shut pretty quickly in the media cycle." Perseus Books seems to already be thinking along these lines with titles like Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's The Michael Jackson Tapes, which was released last week, just a few short months after the singer's death in June. The book, by a onetime Jackson confidant, came out less than three weeks after Jackson was finally buried: Talk about getting it out before the window slams shut.

According to Rich, Brown "envisioned most of the Beast Books titles as being 40,000 words, or about 150 pages. They would cover touchstone political and cultural topics first addressed on the website, as well as more personal memoirs."

To many critics, Brown is an unlikely emissary of the future. As the former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker and co-founder of Talk (which included a book-publishing imprint called Talk Miramax Books), Brown was widely viewed as a digital arriviste when she launched the Beast for Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp last year.

As Talk was foundering in 2001, then-New York magazine columnist Michael Wolff wrote a devastating column about Brown that literally portrayed her as lost and wandering about blindly. "Tina Brown is a lost figure who can no longer even find her way to the main thoroughfare of her life and career," Wolff wrote cattily.

In her own launch Q&A, Brown cheekily called herself a "dinosaur" and acknowledged the long-held media joke about her that she has her "assistant print out the Internet" so that she can read it on paper. "The Internet is too big to print out," Brown quipped. "That's the whole point.

Then again, Beast Books may not be about Brown embracing the future at all: Maybe it's a return to form—long-form journalism, that is.

On WNYC's The Takeaway this morning, co-host John Hockenberry interviewed the Times Rich about the project and wondered if Beast Books would be a place for those "20,000-word New Yorker pieces on bats" that can't seem to find a home in contemporary magazines' tighter feature wells and more focus-grouped editorial mixes. If a reporter or commentator is engaged enough with a topic to write at length, why shouldn't someone rush to publish their work as more than a truncated magazine article or multipage Web story?

As if to illustrate the point, Rich's Times story on Beast Books shares the paper's Arts section with a review of her colleague Sam Tanenhaus' book The Death of Conservatism. That book grew out of a New Republic Story by Tanenhaus, the Times' Book Review and Week-in-Review editor, headlined Conservatism is Dead. That story ran in February, and according to the New York Observer's Leon Neyfakh, the book that grew out of the it was meant to be "a slightly expanded and restructured version of the 6,650-word magazine piece." Should it really take seven months to "slightly expand and restructure" an essay into a book? Probably not.

Hey, maybe Tina Brown is on to something.