Tina Brown

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Christina Hambley Brown
Tina Brown speaking at Barnes and Nobles about The Diana Chronicles.
Born	November 21, 1952 (1952-11-21) (age 55) Maidenhead, England
Occupation	journalist, magazine editor, columnist, talk-show host and author of The Diana Chronicles

Tina Brown, Lady Evans (born Christina Hambley Brown on November 21, 1952, in Maidenhead, England) is a journalist, magazine editor, columnist, talk-show host and author of The Diana Chronicles, a biography of Diana, Princess of Wales, a personal friend. Born a British citizen, she took United States citizenship in 2005. She became the editor-in-chief of Tatler magazine at the age of 25, and rose to prominence in the American media industry as the editor of the magazines Vanity Fair from 1984 to 1992 and of The New Yorker from 1992 to 1998. In 2007, she was named to the Magazine Editors Hall of Fame.^[1] She has also been honored with four George Polk Awards, five Overseas Press Club awards, and ten National Magazine Awards.^[2] She is currently writing a non-fiction work on Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Journalism career 3 Editing career 3.1 Early years 3.2 New Yorker 3.3 Talk Magazine 4 Recent work 4.1 The Diana Chronicles 4.2 News Aggregator 5 Publications 6 Bibliography 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Biography

She and her elder brother, Christopher Hambley Brown, grew up in Little Marlow, in Buckinghamshire, on the outskirts of London.^[3] Her parents, George Hambley Brown and Bettina Iris Mary (Kohr) Brown, were prominent figures in the British film industry. George produced the first Agatha Christie films starring Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple. His other films included The Chiltern Hundreds (1949); Hotel Sahara (1951), starring Yvonne De Carlo; Guns at Batasi (1964), starring Richard Attenborough and Mia Farrow; and Terror Under the House (1971), starring Joan Collins.

In 1939 George Hambley Brown married the actress Maureen O'Hara, though the marriage, which was never consummated according to O'Hara due to her parents' intervention, later was annulled. He later met Bettina Kohr, who was Laurence Olivier's press agent. In her later years, Bettina worked as a gossip columnist for an English-language magazine for expatriates in Spain, where she and George lived in retirement.

Brown was a rebellious adolescent. She was expelled from three boarding schools; in her words, she was expelled from one because she "organized protests because we weren't allowed to change our underpants," and another "where I had described (the headmistress's) bosom as an unidentified flying object."^[4]

Brown studied at St Anne's College, Oxford. Before graduating in 1974 she won the 1973 Sunday Times Drama Award for her one-act play Under the Bamboo Tree. A subsequent play, Happy Yellow, was mounted at a small theatre in London in 1977. She also wrote for Isis, the university literary magazine, to which she contributed interviews with the columnist Auberon Waugh and the actor Dudley Moore. She ended up dating both men.^{[citation needed]} Her relationship with Waugh served as a great boost to her writing career, as he used his influence to get attention drawn to her. At this time in the mid '70s she also dated the writer Martin Amis.

She met Harold Evans in 1974, and began working for his Sunday Times as a writer. Evans divorced his wife in 1978. Evans and Brown were married in East Hampton, New York, at the home of then-Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn on August 20, 1981. Brown lives in New York City with her husband, Sir Harold Evans, and two children, a son, George, born in 1986 and a daughter, Izzy, born in 1990. Izzy attends St. George's School in Newport, Rhode Island and was captain of the JV girl's hockey team. She's a goalie for that team.^[2][3]

[edit] Journalism career

In 1973 she won the Pakenham Award for the best young journalist. The Sunday Times called her the Most Promising Female Journalist, and in March of 1974, the British edition of Cosmopolitan magazine described her as a "stunning twenty-year-old playwright." In this period, Brown wrote a regular column for Punch magazine. She reported from New York for the paper and its colour magazine. In 1978 the magazine gave her the Young Journalist of the Year Award.^[3] That same year she quit to join Harold Evans at The Sunday Telegraph in London.

Brown also wrote columns on politics and culture for The Washington Post and The New York Sun in 2004 and 2005.^{[citation needed]} Unfortunately, her Washington Post column was not well received within the newsroom itself.^[5]

[edit] Editing career

[edit] Early years

Brown became editor of Tatler in June 1979 at the invitation of its new owner, the Australian millionaire Gary Bogard; in a short time she quadrupled its circulation to 40,000.^{[citation needed]} In 1982 S. I. ("Si") Newhouse Jr., owner of Condé Nast Publications, bought the magazine, and in 1983 it was voted England's Magazine of the Year.

After leaving Tatler she was hired in May 1983 as an editorial adviser to Vanity Fair in New York, initially for six weeks. She stayed on as a contributing editor for a brief time, and then was named editor-in-chief on January 1, 1984. Her restructuring of the magazine debuted with the April 1984 issue, featuring actress Daryl Hannah on the cover. She brought in Dominick Dunne as a writer on crime and Helmut Newton as a daring photographer. The magazine's readership began to grow in 1985, and the magazine eventually became a tremendous success both in circulation and profit.^{[citation needed]} She took the sales from around 200,000 to more than a million with a mix of celebrity interviews, serious foreign affairs specials, columnists and photography. She persuaded the novelist William Styron to write about his depression under the title Darkness Visible, which subsequently became a best-selling nonfiction book.

[edit] New Yorker

See also: The New Yorker History section

“	Working for Tina is a serious business. You work really hard and you're always needing to show you're worth her respect. She doesn't take kindly to people who need to be babied, and there isn't, perhaps, accommodation for people who work at a different speed.[6]	”
—Susan Orlean

“	We realize that the old way wasn't working and you need to have a revolutionary to come in and reinvent things. A lesser personality than Tina could not have achieved all that.[7]	”
—Malcolm Gladwell

In 1992, she accepted the company's invitation to become editor of The New Yorker. She redesigned the magazine and introduced the first staff photographer, Richard Avedon. She brought in many new reporters and critics, including Richard Hertzberg, Simon Schama, Jeffrey Toobin, Anthony Lane, Malcolm Gladwell and the man she eventually nominated as her successor, David Remnick, then a reporter with the Washington Post.^[7] She also hired Pam McCarthy, who she worked with at Vanity Fair and is currently the deputy editor. She retained long-time writers like John Updike, Roger Angell, Brendan Gill, and Philip Hamburger. Over the years she let 79 writers go while recruiting 50 new writers.^[7]

Her tenure was controversial: she was accused of being a vulgarian and destroying the New Yorker, while she argued that she cut dead wood and reinvigorated it.^{[citation needed]} Over her tenure, circulation increased by 30 percent, adding 250,000 new readers.^{[citation needed]} Brown insisted on timeliness from writers, but often allowed writers the freedom to select subjects.^[6] The magazine's Establishment currently looks at her leadership amicably.^[7]

In 1998, she resigned from the New Yorker following an invitation from Harvey and Bob Weinstein of Miramax Films (owned by the Disney Company) to be the chairman in a new multi-media company they intended to start with a new magazine, a book company and a television show. The Hearst company came in as partners with Miramax.

[edit] Talk Magazine

Tina Brown created Talk magazine, a monthly glossy, and appointed Jonathan Burnham and Susan Mercandetti to manage Talk Books. Both magazine and book company made an immediate impact, the magazine with a circulation around 800,000 and the book company with a number of best sellers (including the memoir of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani). Three years after the launch the magazine was on track to viability, with rising circulation and advertising revenues, but the company was badly damaged in the advertising recession after the September 11, 2001 attacks and the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center. Publication was suspended soon afterward and Talk Books was absorbed into Miramax.^{[citation needed]}

Despite the magazine's ability to attract a steady stream of leading stars for its covers, it failed to find its niche, and Brown found that Talk's corporate backers were less patient than the Newhouses (the owners of Conde Nast) when the magazine ran up losses estimated at $55 million (£38 million).^[8] Weinstein, to prevent further losses, canceled the venture in January 2002, with Brown receiving a half of her £1.4 million contract.^[9] Brown said that, despite the failure of the magazine, she had no regrets about embarking on the project. "I was at the New Yorker, I had had a wonderful time for nearly seven years and wanted to go and do something on my own, I wanted to try to do that. I would have always regretted it if I hadn't."^[8]

Brown's career has excited a great deal of controversy over the years, perhaps because of her self-promotional techniques and strong ambition to succeed in New York, a city famous for its ambiguous attitude to aggressively achieving a successful career (Brown herself famously said on arriving in New York: 'You don't make friends, you make contacts.'). One of her most vociferous critics describes her as 'toxic waste' after this failure of Talk magazine, but Brown responded in an interview: 'It was completely understandable. Talk became this kind of hysterically over-inflated sort of media story. And it was fun for people to write about. I thought that it was a little excessive at times. But I'm kind of used to that at this point.'^[10]

[edit] Recent work

Tina Brown went on to produce a series of specials for CNBC. The network followed up by signing her to host a weekly talk show of politics and culture titled Topic [A] With Tina Brown, which debuted on May 4, 2003. The program welcomed guests ranging from political figures, such as Prime Minister Tony Blair and Senator John McCain, to celebrities, such as George Clooney and Annette Bening. The program ended on May 29, 2005, ostensibly because Brown had to dedicate herself to an upcoming book on Diana, Princess of Wales.^[11] Media observers noted, however, that Brown's program had struggled to maintain an audience for the program, such that steady ratings declines likely played a part in Topic [A]'s cancellation.^[12]

A senior editor at the Times has also commented on her writing abilities as a columnist:

“

... the paper decided not to renew her contract. "She does have some talent as a writer but she tries too hard ... She had these good ideas but she never bothered to develop them into anything more than soundbites. Her columns used to read like a list of taglines on the cover of a magazine."[5]

”

[edit] The Diana Chronicles

Main article: The Diana Chronicles

On June 12, 2007, Brown published The Diana Chronicles, a biography of Diana, Princess of Wales. During the Summer 2007, The Diana Chronicles was consistently at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for hardback nonfiction, with two weeks in the number one position.^[13] Brown's critics recognized the successful choice of subject and expected The Diana Chronicles to sell well, in part because of Tina's connection to Diana.^[10]

[edit] News Aggregator

In April 2008, it was reported that Brown had teamed up with InterActive Corp's Barry Diller to create a news aggregator^[14].

[edit] Publications

• Brown, Tina (1979). Loose Talk: Adventures on the Street of Shame. London: Joseph. ISBN 0718118332. 
• Brown, Tina (1983). Life As a Party. London: A. Deutsch. ISBN 0233976000. 
• Brown, Tina (2007). The Diana Chronicles. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0385517084. 

[edit] Bibliography

• Bachrach, Judy (2001). Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0684837633. 

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Official Random House biography
• washingtonpost.com: Tina Brown, archived columns of Brown's from The Washington Post
• HuffPo: Tina Brown, archived columns of Brown's from The Huffington Post

Preceded by Robert Gottlieb

Editor of The New Yorker 1992–1998

Succeeded by David Remnick