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Tina Brown: Fire the media bosses

12/9/2008

Tina Brown, ex-Vanity Fair, ex-New Yorker, now Daily Beast editor, suggests that it's the bosses who need to walk the plank. She says she'd feel a little better if those leaving were the ones at the top killing ideas or foisting their own on people who she says know best.
A summary doesn't do justice to her rant. Here it is.

The Daily Beast: Tina Brown hits the ground running

10/6/2008

Tina Brown, the former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, launched in beta today her new online project, The Daily Beast.
Good timing, bad timing: Lots of news to discuss, but arriving just as the economy tanks. The highlights:
A wide-screen approach. A Flash-based series of key stories (and they're principally stories, with lots of text). Ten things you should be reading. A couple of recommendations from the top-pocket friends of Tina (Bill Clinton, step forward). A few blogs and articles from select folks. A few places they like.
It's very readable, very well edited, and very much tailored to an upmarket audience that enjoys a little (but not loads of) fun. Given day one, it does well.
In short, what an online magazine ought to be doing, what Brown would be doing if she were still at The New Yorker, but not necessarily anything off the charts in terms of innovation. It downplays multimedia (which probably keeps the costs in line, although some of those writers aren't pro bono types) and doesn't open an easy door to user-generated assistance.

Tina Brown opens ONA

9/12/2008

Author and former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown opened the ONA conference today and said the time had come for editors to reassert themselves in an algorithmic age.
Brown's The Daily Beast will launch some time this fall (Oct. 1, Reuters noted last night) and will aggregate content and provide what she hopes will be material no one else has.
She told the ONA conference that she's delighted to be in a medium not worried about its demise. She is working with a smallish budget at a feverish pace, but she had very little to say about her business model except that it's evolving and will be underwritten by advertising. It's part of IAC, Barry Diller's diversified media company.
She said that at some point the nut will be cracked and that advertising's bifurcated period will shake out to permit integration of new media. We're in the middle right now of a transitional moment, she said.
She cut off questions about The Daily Beast, saying she didn't want the event to be a press conference on the site. It was a bit of a hard moment in an otherwise soft session.
Having done that, she later answered a question about how long-form journalism can be created online. She noted that online media is not terribly "hospitable" to long-form narrative writing, but that she wants to explore how to provide extensive information without necessarily doing all of it in text. The 5,000-7,000-word pieces online are too hard to read.
Earlier in the speech and q-and-a session, she had her strongest criticism for media organizations asking journalists to commit to multi-platform production in addition to their normal duties with no addtional pay.
The great con of the 20th and 21st century is the way in which talent has been exploited. There needs to be pushback from the creative community. "It's a pretty savage state of affairs."
She said it's a "great mistake" to assume that anyone can write for a reputable brand.
A "tremendous fall" awaits companies thinking they can replace experienced staff with younger journalists in order to get much more quantity from them.
Advice to young journalists: Avoid the big companies, go into something small and about to close, because that's where you can get into the thick of it.

Tina Brown: Fire the media bosses

The Daily Beast: Tina Brown hits the ground running

Tina Brown opens ONA

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