An Interview With Tina Brown

Image: Todd Heisler/The New York Times

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In Tina Brown's favorite novel, Scoop—Evelyn Waugh's classic send-up of Fleet Street—the fawning editor of the Daily Beast, Mr. Salter, must maneuver delicately past the iron will of his domineering proprietor, Lord Copper. "Up to a point, Lord Copper," Mr. Salter purrs instead of saying "no."
 
Now that Brown has launched her own version of the Daily Beast—a buzz-worthy website backed, to a reported $18 million, by billionaire media lord Barry Diller—she claims no such mealymouthed evasions are necessary.
     
"The thing about Barry is that he enjoys vigorous conversation," Brown told Portfolio.com in an exclusive interview last week, as TheDailyBeast.com was rounding out its second week in the Frank Gehry-designed Chelsea headquarters of Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp. "I love his input, and he understands that I'm an editor, and we do what needs to be done."
    
At 54, the British-born, Oxford-educated Brown—perhaps the most famous magazine editor on either side of the Atlantic—is a virtuoso at handling hard-driving visionaries with big demands: Condé Nast mogul Si Newhouse (for whom she was the groundbreaking editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker); movie magnate Harvey Weinstein (with whom she launched the short-lived Talk magazine with an over-the-top bacchanal on Liberty Island); and now the famously difficult Diller.

In between, she has hosted a CNBC television show, written a bestselling biography of Princess Diana, and, with her husband Sir Harold Evans—himself a famous newspaper editor—become a glittering fixture of Manhattan social life. At long last, Brown is hoping to make her mark on the World Wide Web.

Lloyd Grove: Can you answer the question, Why now? Arguably people might say that you and the Daily Beast are a little late to the game. But, then again, what's the game?
 
Tina Brown: The whole point of the site is being late to the game. I mean, the site is a response, with the overwhelming volume of sites, and the site is a simplification so that you can go to the site and get the speedy, fast, clear, simple menu of what is purely interesting, exciting, or provocative, and not give everybody the huge, great big all-you-can-eat buffet.
 
L.G.: Walk me through just the process by which you decided to do this. Was this your idea? Was this Barry Diller's idea?
 
T.B.: It was actually Barry's idea. And he had the idea first, as a matter of fact, in 2006. And he asked me to do it and I said, "You know, Barry, I'm in the middle of my book. It sounds fun, but your timing is off."
 
L.G.: That was The Diana Chronicles.
 
T.B.: Yeah. I said I really can't do it. I said you have to get someone else. I said I regret that, but I just can't do two things at once, and he said, "Fine, I'll wait for you." I said, "Yeah, yes." I laughed. It's a nice thing to say, but it doesn't sound very convincing. However, he did. And no sooner did he read in one of the columns that I'd finished my book—just literally written the end—than he called me up and said, "Hey, I really want to do the thing we talked about, I'm still here." So, in fact, I had finished my book then and I said, "Well why don't I just come in and spend a few months sort of fooling around with dummies and layouts and stuff, no harm done after a few months if neither of us wants to do it. It'll be fun for me to kind of investigate the Web in a more intense way, from a managing point of view." Because, you know, I'd used the Web all the time and write columns and all the rest of it, but I hadn't actually produced a website. I hadn't done that physical, hands-on thing of doing a site. So I thought that would be fun to learn about as well. So I said "Okay, why don't I come in and do that?"

L.G.: In your previous lives, for instance, Talk magazine obviously had a website attached to it.
 
T.B.: Yes, but I didn't focus on it very much because Harvey [Weinstein] didn't want to bother with it, he didn't want to do it. So there was no focus on it at that time.
 
L.G.: And the same thing with the New Yorker.
 
T.B.: That was so long ago. That was another era.
 
L.G.: Right. And, of course, Vanity Fair. Forget about it.
 
T.B.: Yes, the past was another country. I can't believe how long it now seems. I did the New Yorker in 1992 through 1998. But I said to Barry, "I'll come in for a few months and see whether it's fun to do and whether you want to do it." It was a very, very loose kind of commitment. But then I did a dummy and then kind of showed it to him. He said, "Right, let's do it," and I just thought he was kidding. In a way, the idea was to have some fun and do some experimenting for a few months. I didn't really expect it to go forth from that because I didn't think I'd really want to do it, and I didn't think he would either. But he did, and he said, "Let's do it." I said, "What does that mean?" He said, "Go hire a general manager, and we're just going to do it." [He was just] being Barry.

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