MEDIA STUDIES
A Tina triumph? Or tears within 18 months?
TOBY YOUNG
New York ext Monday, 800 people will gather on New York's Liberty Island to toast the first issue of Talk, Tina Brown's new maga- zine. It's the most ambitious magazine launch since Si Newhouse revived Vanity Fair in 1982 and, by all accounts, it promis- es to be one of New York's most lavish par- ties of the year. I haven't been invited. It's tempting to attribute this to her husband, Harold Evans, who threatened me with a libel writ last year following an article I wrote in this magazine. The sad truth is I wouldn't have been invited anyway. Talk, in spite of its title, is far from media-friendly. When a journalist from the Philadelphia Enquirer asked what the contents of the magazine were two weeks ago she was told they were 'embargoed', even though her article about it is due to appear a day before the official publication date. Philip Delves Broughton, one of the Telegraph's New York correspondents, was told that if he wrote about it before 'the press roll-out' he would be blacklisted from all future Talk events.
The attitude of Talk's staff when con- fronted with press enquiries is similar to that of the Mafia when approached by the FBI. The usual guarantees that they'll be speaking off the record or on deep back- ground — the journalistic equivalent of the Witness Protection Program — aren't enough to allay their fears. A better name for the magazine would be Omerta.
Last Monday I called up an old friend who works for Talk to invite her to the cine- ma. 'I'm sorry, I can't talk to you,' she whis- pered. 'I'm going to have to hang up.' Click. Dialtone. The reason that they're all so paranoid — apart from the usual Ther- midorian levels of terror inspired by Tina Brown — is that there's a great deal at stake. The conventional wisdom in the American magazine-publishing business is that the era of the general-interest maga- zine has passed. The most recent casualty of this trend is George, which was launched by Hachette Filipacche in 1997. Ironically, the recent death of JFK Jnr may have pro- longed its life, but few media analysts give it longer than six months. 'The odds against starting a general-interest magazine have always been long,' says Kurt Andersen, who edited New York magazine from 1993 to 1997, 'and I don't think in this century they've ever been longer.' Indeed, there hasn't been a successful launch of a general-interest magazine since Vanity Fair 17 years ago. Tina Brown, who edited it from 1984 to 1992, deserves some credit for that success but it's worth bearing in mind that, when she left Vanity Fair, its cumulative losses stood at $75 million. As she has related many times, she had to use all her powers of persuasion to stop Si Newhouse from closing it in 1985. It didn't make its first annual profit until at least ten years after its launch.
Talk is being published jointly by Mira- max and Hearst — both notorious cost-cut- ters — and she may have trouble persuad- ing them to ride out her magazine's initial losses. She claims that the cost of launching Talk is $50-60 million but the real figure is probably much higher. By the same token, her assertion that Talk will generate $18 million in advertising revenue by the end of this year should be taken with much salt.
`I think launching a glossy, general-inter- est monthly today could be a $200 million proposition,' says Michael Wolff, media critic of New York magazine. 'Talk is a frag- ile, perilous enterprise.'
So what has induced the Walt Disney Corporation, which as the owner of Mira- max Pictures will be footing the lion's share of the bill, to take such a gamble? Two words: Tina Brown. The general consensus in the American media is that if anyone can pull it off — and the odds are very nearly insurmountable — she can.
`Anyone who bets against Tina is a fool,' says Michael Kinsley, the editor of Slate. `My ignorant assumption is that it will be a huge success and all the people now hoping for it to fail will be gobbling up every issue a year from now.'
What chance people give Talk, then, cru- cially depends on how highly they rate Brown. (The initial spin, that Talk would be the centrepiece of a multimedia empire involving books, film and television, has been quietly dropped.) Those who buy into her myth believe she has an almost super- natural ability to bottle the Zeitgeist, a gift for generating the kind of buzz that adver- tisers and consumers love. Sceptics, on the other hand, think that without Si New- house's deep pockets she is bound to fail.
Already there are rumblings from within Talk that she's 'nickel and diming' her staff. One writer complained to me that he was being paid only $25,000 a year to write a monthly column for the magazine. (A monthly columnist for Vanity Fair, by con- trast, is more likely to receive $250,000.) Another grumbled that Disney's corporate travel office had booked him into a Day's Inn when he was on an assignment for Talk. `That's about two levels below a Holiday Inn,' he explained. 'I looked around and thought, "I'm selling out for this?" ' Earlier this year, she realised she'd need a few literary stars to brighten up the launch issue and signed up Simon Schama, Paul Theroux and Martin Amis. This only served to antagonise her second-string writ- ers even further. (`She offered Martin Amis the moon and the stars,' one of them com- plained.) It also led to the dropping of Talk's subtitle: 'The American Conversa- tion'. A disillusioned ex-employee says, 'It should be called "The British Monologue".'
Some people believe Tina will soon get a taste of her own medicine when Harvey Weinstein, the co-chairman of Miramax Pictures, starts 'nickel and diming' her. An old-fashioned Hollywood mogul, Weinstein is her immediate boss and his influence can already be discerned in the first issue. Gwyneth Paltrow, who's been described by Weinstein as 'the First Lady of Miramax', is on the cover. 'It's very People magazine- ish,' says a person who's seen it.
In the end, the factor that may tell against Brown is that she won't be able to get away with just making Talk a succes d'estime. In the past, she's been able to cre- ate the illusion of success in spite of both Vanity Fair and the New Yorker losing money. This time around, with the Disney stockholders peering over her shoulder, she'll be judged purely on the bottom line. `I predict litigation between her and her employers within 18 months,' crows one rival magazine editor.
Stephen Glover returns next week.
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