Tina Brown's New Persona

The NY Times pulled off a coup and got an interview with Tina Brown, the celebrity editor who managed to parlay a strings of media flops into a $700,000 job running a merged Newsweek and the Daily Beast. It should be interesting.

The Times article might be on to something but it's hard to discern. It ran a big story on how "quiet" she has become and how low key the merger is, in contrast to the typical Tina Brown extravaganza. She gave away nothing to the reporter from whom she turns to peer into her Blackberry continually.

This story doesn't mention it, but a couple weeks ago, the Times itself ran a story about Brown hiring two new writers, Wayne Barrett, who used to be at the Village Voice if you remember it, where he wrote very dense stories about New York politics, and Peter Boyer who was at the New Yorker for 19 years, and wrote very long, understated articles.

On being hired by BeastWeek, Boyer said this in Women's Wear Daily.:

"Once I saw Tina, talked to Tina, thought about jumping onto this ride — whatever it was going to be — it was just so exciting. (Women's Wear Daily) I asked my wife, she said I could, and I was gone."

It doesn't sound like the flamboyant talent Tina Brown used to hire.

Still, the story just struggles to find something to say. They talked of a redesign in the making, but Brown was not forthcoming, and the best they got was an advertising guy who said it would use thicker paper. So we know it will look fat and substantial.

The Times's competition didn't seem impressed either. I couldn't find any mention of this article in the usual suspects.

The best coverage of this media event comes in the New York Post. They're on top of the layoffs and buyouts of the old Newsweek staff.

Tina Brown’s Quiet Restart of Newsweek

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The Futility of Blogging

The Times, and indeed most of the news media, love polls. They sound so scientific. And so, the online edition gives big play to a story about how the young are flocking to Facebook and Twitter.

The article has everything: quotes and percentages, age ranges and a comparison with the similar poll two years ago.

Didn't the Times, and everyone else, just finish breathlessly covering the latest infusion of billions of investment cash into Facebook? Isn't it painfully obvious that these social sites are the big thing? Doesn't everyone know that Twitter allows at most 140 characters in a post, including white spaces?

The story celebrates its wide-eyed amazement by pointing out that successful blogs have grown and are "indistinguishable from more traditional news sources." Meanwhile, the writers of blogs chronicling the emotional upsets of high school fail to inspire their authors because of a lack a readers.

Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter

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A Luddite Lament

At the top of the online edition, bumping down the Tina Brown story which is now stuck on Page 1 of the paper edition, is a story about the fact that without paper books, no one will be able
to scribble notes in the margins.

If you think about it, the fact that historians have to spend years of their lives in library stacks reading scribbles made history an exclusive gentleman's club that few people aspired to join. But I digress.

The article quotes a professor who notes, "People will always find a way to annotate electronically." (Why didn't I think of that?) He goes on to say, "But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved."

We are truly at the very beginning of a cultural revolution of the magnitude of the invention of moveable type. You can understand that some people are just standing there dumbfounded, blinking in the glare. He's not thinking about the preservation of the artifacts of our civilization for a far distant future, anymore than he's thinking about the near destruction of western culture when the libraries at Alexandria were finally destroyed in the seventh century during the Muslim conquest. (They were damaged earlier by Christians and by pagans at war.)


Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins

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Overwhelmed in the Middle East

I'm not ignoring the cataclysm in the Arab world. It's frightening and awesome at the same time. The events are so far-flung and vast that even the swarm of western news people seems to be losing its grip. Many of the latest turns are happening where the reporters ain't, either they just didn't get there or they're not allowed in -- as I imagine is the case in Libya and Iran. In many ways, I like the reporting better when there's some distance. And the big story is the speech by Qaddafi's son in Libya warning of a civil war.

The best is the story from Tunis that starts out talking about how the army was called in to protect the legal brothels from "a mob of zealots." Reading it makes it clear how different things are from one country to the next, and how dumb it is to make sweeping pronouncements, and to try to predict the future.

Next Question for Tunisia: The Role of Islam in Politics

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