Ms. Brown, according to staff members who were present, spoke excitedly about the potential synergies for advertisers across platforms and promised to produce a new form of magazine journalism, where digital would drive print instead of the other way around. But after a few softball questions from the staff, Peter Lauria, the company’s media reporter, braved a more skeptical one:
Given that the two publications lost more than $30 million in the previous two years, he asked, why was it a good idea to put them together? And if The Beast was on schedule to break even in 18 months, how much longer would it take now that Newsweek was part of the mix?
Ms. Brown says she has no recollection of that particular meeting, but half a dozen employees who say they were present said the atmosphere immediately turned awkward. The famous editor gave no ground. The target, she said, remained 18 months.
More than two and a half years later, Ms. Brown has missed the mark. Synergies have long since slipped away. After the magazine hemorrhaged tens of millions of dollars, Barry Diller, the billionaire media mogul whose company owns both publications, publicly called the purchase of Newsweek “a mistake” and the original plan to save it “stupid.” On Saturday, the company announced that it had sold Newsweek for an undisclosed amount to the digital news company International Business Times.
It was always a quixotic project to blend a buzzy, growing Web site with the most outdated of print relics, a newsweekly. But interviews with more than two dozen former and current employees — some provided by Ms. Brown and some reached independently — suggested that she and Mr. Diller underestimated what it would take to reverse the dive of a print magazine (the two have acknowledged as much) and that there was never a credible plan to integrate the products into a better whole (an opinion they utterly contest). These people also suggest that Ms. Brown’s intensely demanding and chaotic management style, which had thrived when contained within established companies, proved a combustible combination with Newsweek’s gutted and weakened editorial and sales divisions.
Dan Lyons, Newsweek’s former technology editor, summed up the sentiment in a Facebook post when the magazine was first put up for sale: “It didn’t need to be as ugly and sad and dishonest as what’s happened under Barry and Tina.”
Ms. Brown, for her part, said that it took at least a year to assemble a team she wanted, and undoubtedly she bruised some egos along the way.
“We did a cover on the beached white male and perhaps that’s another reason for the old guard to be angry at me,” she joked during a recent interview at The Beast’s offices. But she said she had no regrets.
“It was really exhilarating,” she said. “We did great journalism.”
Ms. Brown knows great journalism, having built her reputation with her wholesale makeover of Vanity Fair and her stewardship at The New Yorker. At both magazines, she increased circulation, introduced dozens of young writers, many of whom went on to become stars, and won shelves of awards.
But, despite her reputation, she said publicly that she was happy to be away from print. “I would hate to be in the magazine world,” she told the EconWomen conference in 2008. “It’s a really tough world to have to compete in.” That was the year that Ms. Brown started working for Mr. Diller as The Daily Beast was introduced.
What pulled her back, she says, was the billionaire investor Sidney Harman — his enthusiasm, charm and generous financial resources to match — and the chance to return to long-form journalism. Although Ms. Brown does not utter the word “Talk,” her last print magazine, which ended in heartbreaking failure, she acknowledges that she missed the “rhythms” of long-form journalism and that she felt she could not do all the work she craved on the Web.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/05/business/media/the-last-temptation-of-tina-brown.html?partner=rss&emc=rss