QM Events

March 21, 2009     ARCHIVES

Media Guru Breakfast: Tina Brown

The struggling US magazine industry lost one of its biggest names to the web when Tina Brown traded the glossy pages and lengthy essays of her past career for the hyperlinks and blog entries of a newish site called The Daily Beast. http://www.thedailybeast.com/ It debuted in early October 2008 to excellent notices. Brown describes the property on the site as “a speedy, smart edit of the web from the merciless point of view of what interests the editors. The Daily Beast is the omnivorous friend who hears about the best stuff and forwards it to you with a twist.” As the April Media Guru, Tina Brown will not only talk about this latest adventure in her long career in journalism and the media, but some of her other adventures as well. They include (in reverse order): 

• 2007—- Tina came out with her first book—the New York Times bestseller about the life and times of Princess Diana, The Diana Chronicles
• From 2003 to 2005 Tina was the host of CNBC’s Topic A with Tina Brown, a weekly series which featured opinionated guests discussing and debating provocative topics in the arenas of business, politics and culture. At the same time, she also wrote a weekly column for The Washington Post Style section.
• From 1998 to 2002, Tina ran Talk Media with partners Harvey and Bob Weinstein of Miramax Films launching Talk magazine and the Talk Miramax Books company. Talk’s publication was suspended in January 2002. Talk Miramax Books was run as a boutique publishing house until 2005, when it was made a part of Hyperion at Disney. Out of 42 books published under Tina’s tenure, 11 have appeared on The New York Times Bestseller List
• From 1983 until 1998, Tina worked at Condé Nast magazines in the U.S. She was the editor-in-chief of the recently launched and seriously ailing Vanity Fair magazine. Under her direction from 1984 to 1992, Vanity Fair rose from a circulation of 350,000 to 1.1 million and won four National Magazine Awards, including a 1989 award for General Excellence. Ms. Brown herself was named Advertising Age’s first Magazine Editor of the Year. In 1992, she became the fourth – and first female—editor of The New Yorker magazine. In her six and a half year tenure, she raised circulation by 145 percent on the newsstand and 28 percent overall and the magazine was honored with 4 George Polk Awards, 5 Overseas Press Club Awards, and 10 National Magazine Awards, including a 1995 award for General Excellence, the first in the magazine’s history. Ms. Brown was the first magazine editor to be honored with the National Press Foundation’s Editor of the Year Award in 1992.
• In 1979 when she was 25 years old, Tina’s editorial reputation for revitalizing publications began at the Tatler magazine, a nearly defunct 270-year-old “society” magazine in London where she was named editor-in-chief. During her tenure there from 1979 to 1983, the circulation rose 300 percent and was purchased by Condé Nast magazines in 1982.Tina Brown graduated with an M.A. from Oxford at St. Anne’s Collee.

Tina Brown graduated with an M.A. from Oxford at St. Anne’s College.

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SPEAKER EVENTS WITH MEDIA INDUSTRY LEADERS