Tina Brown on Editing the New Yorker: “I electrified a sleeping beauty.”

From an interview by David Marchese of Tina Brown in The New York Times Magazine:

Unlike most journalists, Tina Brown carries with her an aura of swashbuckling glamour, a remnant of her starry, high-budget run during the 1980s and ’90s as editor in chief of Vanity Fair and then The New Yorker. Like many journalists, Brown, 66, has pivoted in recent years to an adjacent line of work, in her case the live-event business. . . .Despite her career shifts, it’s her magazine work — after leaving The New Yorker, she edited the short-lived Talk, as well as the Daily Beast website and Newsweek — for which she remains best known. . . .

Renata Adler argued in her book that you turned the New Yorker into a less unique magazine. Look, I brought in David Remnick, Jeffrey Toobin, Anthony Lane, Jane Mayer. Everybody is superstar talent, and they weren’t already superstar talent. I found these people. Jeffrey Toobin was, like, an assistant U.S. attorney. Frankly, I electrified a sleeping beauty that had become self-satisfied and self-admiring and was covered in fake ivy. There were the people who thought of themselves as good because they were at The New Yorker rather than at The New Yorker because they were good. They were no longer earning their place. I had to go through all of that crap; Jamaica Kincaid calling me “Stalin in high heels,” which I probably was. . . .

I developed a two-strand approach to editing: In the front of the book I would have current analysis of, for example, the O.J. Simpson trial by Jeffrey Toobin, but in the feature well I might have a classic New Yorker piece, which could have appeared in any one of three or four issues around it. I made the magazine relevant, and they’ve absolutely continued to have those two strands. . . .

Another New Yorker writer, Lawrence Weschler, said you were too interested in chasing buzzy stories. . . .What is buzz? It’s a story that everybody wants to talk about. Isn’t it a writer’s job to make people find something so interesting that they talk about it? We published great stuff in The New Yorker that people did want to talk about. If that’s “buzz,” I’ll take it. . . .

Is being an editor in chief again something you’d ever think about doing? I have to suppress those feelings, because I love content, to use the horrible word, and editors now are so beleaguered that all the fun that I had isn’t there to be had. It’s a shame that editors get so little time now to think about stories and writers. Most of their time is spent having incredibly boring meetings about distribution and platforms and branded digital content. All this stuff, it’s just incredibly miserable. What I love, and what I’ve always loved, is telling stories.