Tina Brown: “Her gift is to feel the big story.”
Tina Brown was one of the hot magazine editors—she edited Vanity Fair from 1984 to 1992 and the New Yorker from 1992 to 1998. Her new book, The Vanity Fair Diaries, was reviewed this week by Nathan Heller in the New Yorker. Here are some insights into Tina the editor from the story “How Tina Brown Remixed the Magazine.”
. . . Brown has become synonymous with the last great renaissance of American print magazines. At Vanity Fair and then at The New Yorker, she expanded readerships. Her editorial appetites were fierce; she raked in news and new writers and cash. Some people found her style unsettling, and her victories did little to alter that judgment. Brown’s legacy remains controversial not because her success is in question but because, for some, too much was lost in her kind of success. . . .
. . . she learns from her vantage inside the magazine and finds New York thrilling: “It’s high-stakes and frightening, which is pretty sexy.” (“Sexy” is one of Brown’s favorite words.) As the consultancy ends, she works up the courage to tell Newhouse that she wants the editorship. “I will do a good, jazzy job for you, Si, if you want me,” she says. . . .
What makes a great editor? The answer is not obvious, because neither is the nature of an editor’s creative work. Some editors-in-chief are micromanagers. Others roam. Some are dais creatures; many huddle at their desks. The basic task of editing is to serve as a polarized filter—to let in light this way and not that way—but good magazine editors do something more: they focus light into a sensibility that comes through on each page. A GQ editor knows how his or her readers aren’t Esquire’s. An editor moving from The American Prospect to The Nation must recalibrate in taste. “You have to be able to throw a magazine on the floor opened to any page and instantly know what magazine you’re looking at and who the reader is,” a British editor tells Brown. She takes it as a standard for Vanity Fair.
Magazines can be text-driven, or photo-driven, or headline- and package-driven. What editors focus their attention on—what they bend and crimp the other elements around—transforms accordingly. Brown’s Vanity Fair was driven by what she calls the “mix”: the table of contents, the balancing and juxtaposition of features. “The endless conundrum of how to get the mix perfect is what keeps me from getting bored,” she writes. A mixologist needs an instinct for eclecticism (this pairing is dull, that one has a kick) and a sensitivity to context. Also, a big cutting-room floor. . . .
Dunne soon becomes a critical part of her mix, along with photographers such as Annie Leibovitz and Helmut Newton. “A VF formula that works is beginning to finally suggest itself,” she writes. “Celeb cover to move the newsstand, juicy news narrative . . . A-list literary piece, visual escapism, revealing political profile, fashion. If we nail each of these per issue it’s gonna work.”. . .
At The New Yorker, she sought to restore the newsier, jauntier illustrated weekly invented by Harold Ross. When she started at Vanity Fair, she cast off the zazzy type and the coffee-table culture writing of seventies Condé Nast and reembraced the crispness of the twenties magazine. Glamorous, irreverent; traditional, fresh. Her risky vision was to have something for everybody, but to get the whole to hang together, too. . . .
British editors often seem to hire writers, editors, artists, and photographers with an eye to character and quirk, as if casting an opera buffa: there’s the prince, the ingénue, the intellectual, the dame, the dandy, the wit, and the sharp-shooting kid. Americans tend to favor well-decorated men and women who make sound and solid points, as if staffing a cabinet. In the diaries, Brown chafes against the sanctimony of American newsprint. “What I miss here is the surprise of a Hollywood splash lighting up a news page or an irreverent headline undercutting a pompous public moment,” she laments. “There is huge snobbery and hand-wringing here about what ‘serious’ papers ‘should’ publish and where writers ‘should’ write.”. . .
Throughout her career, Brown has been described as a newshound or as a trader in buzzy ideas, but the diaries suggest something else. Brown is a people hound, registering change when it crosses her near field of vision. Her gift is to feel the big story emerging in the small, human detail.
That instinct fuelled her rescue of Vanity Fair. In 1985, when its sustainability is still unclear and Newhouse comes within a hairsbreadth of pulling the plug, she scores a photo shoot with the Reagans, in the White House. As the First Couple breezes through, wearing black tie, her photographer starts playing a recording of Sinatra’s “Nancy (with the Laughing Face)” on a boom box. The Reagans are taken aback. Then they begin to dance. The First Lady kicks up a heel. Snap, snap. They kiss. Snap. This, Brown decides, is the image of the eighties.
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P.S. from Jack: Tina talks about the importance of the mix—the table of contents, the balancing and juxtaposition of features. Reading Vanity Fair in the 1980s, I was struck by what also seemed her geographical balancing act: She had good New York and Los Angeles stories in almost every issue and often ran pieces set in London, Paris, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, and other big cities. With all her great instincts, she also seemed to have an organized mind when it came to looking for readers.
At the Washingtonian, saying yes and no every day to stories, I found it hard to keep track of what was in progress. It sounds a little obsessive but I had a bulletin board tucked away in the publisher’s office and on it I’d put up a small note when I okayed a story. The notes were on colored paper—with different colors for profiles, serious pieces, light pieces, visual pieces, service pieces—and the bulletin board was divided into months of the year. When I put up a note on a new piece, I could look at the bulletin board and see if future issues seemed to have a balance of types of stories. No good visual pieces in the works? Let’s sit down with the photo editor and see what we might come up with.
I also worried about geographical balance. In Washington, the area is divided into DC, the Maryland suburbs, and the Virginia suburbs, with DC less than 20 percent of the magazine’s target audience. So it was important to look for geographical balance as well as type-of-story balance.
As for Tina, when it came to editorial balance she was a lot smarter than her successor.
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