An Interview With Tina Brown

T.B.: It's true. I used to wonder about that, but now I know what can be done when you're in a frenetic state.

L.G.: Here's a question I'm curious about: Are you paying your writers?

T.B.: We pay professional writers.

L.G.: At market rates?

T.B.: Certainly at competitive Web rates. Listen, let's put it this way, if I ever hear the words, "he's at Condé Nast," I'd put down the telephone.

L.G.: [Laughs]

T.B.: Condé Nast only competes with itself at the moment. But there's a hell of a lot of writers out there who are floating around who are looking for places to publish things.

L.G.: Right, but a lot of the people that you have featured are your A-list, right?

T.B.: Those are people I have very good relationships with. It's wonderful. I feel very touched that some of the old friends have sort of come forth and multiplied. I think the thing about writers is, most of all, they like feedback and they like to be read. And in this competitive place for eyeballs right now, it's so hard to make an impact with something, you get so overwhelmed with others' competing material that I think when writers feel that there is a place where they can put their stuff and get a response, it's quite remarkable what type of material starts to come in. One of the things I'm freaked out about—and it's wonderful—is I wake up in the morning and there's something in my inbox from somebody that I didn't actually call, to say, "I just read this," "I just came back from so and so," "I just wrote this," you know. I woke up this morning, and now I had a post from Andrew Neil, former editor of the London Sunday Times, and he's started to be one of our bloggers on the British economy. And, quite frankly, he's got a ton of other things he could be doing.

L.G.: Arianna Huffington doesn't pay her writers, as you know—her bloggers particularly.

T.B.: Don't forget, Lloyd, it's a completely different model, because that's a come-one-come-all, multi sort of present site. We are commissioning and not just trying to publish every blog that comes in as a post. It's going through editors. It's not people posting without an editor, it's people writing for either a commission or a particular editor. We accept and we reject.

L.G.: Some people have written that yours is sort of a "voice of God" internet site.

T.B.: No, no, because there's still comments, an interactive nature of the site, there's a lot of free exchange. Let's put it this way, it's a much more free marketplace than a magazine where you have to kind of harbor your print pages. We want to cultivate our own voices, and as the site grows, there probably will be many voices. We really want, first of all, to establish a literary standard and a level of thought and conversation, which then in a sense becomes self-replenishing, with people who are attracted to the site because they're those kinds of writers and thinkers and people. And then you could establish a roster of people that you particularly love to hear from, and then they, in turn, attract others like them. So it's really, at this point, about establishing the tone and quality and standard of the site.

L.G.: There's always been a tension, on the internet and within various internet companies and journalistic enterprises, between democracy and editorial control. You are an editor, obviously.

T.B.: We are in between. We do feel that our service is to be discerning, so we're kind of in between a site that is really an edited, fully commissioned site and one that is wholly kind of user-generated. We have user-generated content, and we also do stuff about user-generated content, and we aggregate user-generated content. But we're not just looking to simply post everything in the world that's close to the door right now, because we're trying to say this is a site that will save you time, so we're only going to give you stuff that interests us.

L.G.: What about the notion that, as your old "friend" Michael Wolff—who I gather went to Barry and asked Barry if he would back his site [Newser.com]—.

T.B.: I didn't know that history.

L.G.: But he was saying that buzz doesn't get you the kind of traffic you want, that the businesses that make money are the ones that you don't hear all that much about.

T.B: I certainly think he's hoping for that.

L.G.: [Laughs]

T.B.: Listen, that's his story and he's sticking to it. What can I say?

L.G.: But even Arianna—