Posted on 05/02/2014 1:51:45 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
rom the living room of Barry Diller’s Manhattan apartment in the Carlyle Hotel, it is possible, on a clear day, to see the Midtown skyline, where the Condé Nast building rises like a ziggurat from the Gilded Age of magazine journalism. The view was an appropriate one for a man who in the autumn of 2010 was about to pour millions of dollars into the dead tree business.
Diller runs IAC, a portfolio of Internet companies that includes Match.com, OkCupid and Vimeo. His tolerance for risk is such that his friend David Geffen once described the fireplug of a billionaire as having “elephant balls.” Diller’s bets often pay off. He owns one of the biggest sailing yachts in the world. His neighbor is Mick Jagger. Print journalism, though, would be a different kind of gamble for him.
Joining Diller in his living room was 92-year-old stereo magnate Sidney Harman. A few weeks earlier, Harman had paid $1 to buy Newsweek from the Washington Post Co. The once-proud magazine was in a death spiral, having lost more than $70 million in the previous two years, after various failed efforts to save it had only resulted in circulation plunging to half of what it had been a few years earlier, an exodus of marquee writers and a full-fledged identity crisis. Harman—who had taken on what a well-placed source told me was nearly $75 million in liabilities for his $1—needed a turnaround artist.
And there she was, perched next to Diller, legs crossed, a perfect tousle in her blond bob: Tina Brown, the legendary former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Famous for generating “buzz,” Brown had remade the magazine business in the 1980s and 1990s....
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
PUKE!
Harman? I’m rebuilding one of his stereos that my Dad bought in the Sixties! Powered by 4 EL-84s. Can’t wait ti get this tube baby back up and running!
Gosh, whatta wunnerful story.
Aging decrepit 60’s Libs lose hundreds of millions running same old tired institutional Leftist crap in front of the illiterate masses.
Tears of joy run down my face...
tina brown: the elite of the elite. An arrogant leftist.
The New Yorker used to be a pretty good magazine, with first rate fiction and poetry and great cartoons, until Tina Brown got hold of it and wrecked it. She got out without losing too much money, and maybe she made it appeal more to the liberal nutcases, but it was no longer worth reading.
Maybe that would have happened anyway, but she was way ahead of the magazine-wrecking game.
“Aging decrepit 60’s Libs lose hundreds of millions running same old tired institutional Leftist crap in front of the illiterate masses.”
Good description; as often as I think some conservatives are living in the past or in denial about demographic shifts in this country, the left certainly has no shortage of people doing the same...
Tina, GO HOME!
Yes read.
Some of the best companies in the USA are now being transformed into this kind of nonsense.
I’m surprised Tina lasted this long.
There are a lot of lessons to learn from the Daily Beast / Newsweek disaster. One is that trendy magazine editors whose life blood is generating “buzz” likely are only able to do it once in their lifetime. Tina could not revive the magic she brought to Vanity Fair. She “lost it” in the 90s and everything she has done since then has been an expensive disaster.
It’s the Commie way the more you fail the faster you get promoted. Look at Gorbachev who was a failed District Agriculture bureaukrat and rose to head the Politburo.
I am so glad Barry Diller hired Tina Brown. For some reason every one of Diller’s enterprises turns into an extremist liberal / anti-conservative smear machine. So I celebrate every time one of Diller’s enterprises bites the dust, especially Newsweek.
Or the market moved on her. Lot’s of these “successful” people are one trick ponies. They made millions or billions and then place it on the roulette wheel of life. If they’re lucky they die before they lose it all. Let the heirs blow through the fortune.
1. The entire perspective was through the lens of the LIBERAL perspective.. and 2. Brown stated "“The story was it was an unsavable magazine that we had a quixotic stab at saving. It couldn’t be saved, and we moved on. The magazine may have had a different fate had they turned 180 degrees from the LIBERAL rag it was, to a solid Conservative presentation.
My point: it's worked well for FOX NEWS and when Murdock launched it he was told the odds were against him because of his Conservative leanings.
The real PROBLEM: Tina Brown IS A liberal AND liberals cannot PRESENT A CONSERVATIVE POV BECAUSE they cannot COMPREHEND IT.
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