Tina Brown on intellectual serendipity, the Elon Musk era and why "magazines are mostly done"

An interview with the iconic editor turned Substacker

“I think of those Vanity Fair days as the dinosaur days. They were the great days of Condé Nast, and they were so much fun. It wasn't just about the expense accounts, it was about the freedom and joy of only having to really think about the content, the hiring of the writers, how your cover was going to look, and what was going to be in the magazine… [Now t]he media has become a miserable, angst-ridden profession, where everybody sits there going on about ‘the business model’.”

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When friends ask me whose career I want to emulate, I struggle to locate an individual who has done the specifically weird cocktail of things I have. But I can tell you who has inspired me the most over my career so far: Tina Brown. The editor of Tatler (aged just 25), Vanity Fair (aged just 29)¹, The New Yorker, the short-lived Talk magazine and The Daily Beast, Brown is arguably the most successful and iconic magazine editor of all time and, at the age of 71, as energetic and curious as she ever was. We named The High Low after the brand of high/low journalism she pioneered for Vanity Fair, which suggests that a rich cultural life combines high and lowbrow content (and that good writing can make the low speak to the high.)

That mix has always been how I approach culture — and now this newsletter — and so I was thrilled when Brown agreed to come on to The High Low in 2017 to talk about The Vanity Fair Diaries. We stayed in touch and a few years later, she asked me to interview her on stage about The Palace Papers (the follow-up to her wildly successful book, The Diana Chronicles.) When I saw she had joined Substack, I knew it was a time for a third round. Because Tina Brown starting a Substack, means something about the state of media. And so I called her up on Zoom and chewed her ear off. Below, is a condensed version of our conversation. I do hope you enjoy it.

Tina! Hi. You’ve worked during (and defined) what I think of as three eras: The Gold Rush (when mags made lashings of money and had tons of kudos), The Dotcom Boom (when you moved from editing glossies to a website, The Daily Beast) and now, The Headline Era, where people scroll through their devices at great speed, frequently reading only the headlines (your response was to launch the Truth Tellers Summit.)

But then when I saw you had started your Substack, Fresh Hell, I thought, perhaps we are now entering a fourth era: The Solo Publishing Era. You close your 2017 book, The Vanity Fair Diaries, with this quote: “An appreciation of powerful indie journalism is reviving. We may even be at the start of a new golden age.” So I want to start by asking you: is Substack this new golden age?

I think it might be. I’m enjoying it so much. I love pivoting. I’m a news junkie. To be honest with you, I could break stories every day.

Something I find interesting about Substack and other similar types of solo publishing, is the lack of word count. Newspapers have tight word counts because (I was always told) that the reader stops reading at 1,500 words. But my Substack posts that ‘perform’ (urgh) the best are 3,000 words plus… When do you think the reader stops reading?

I've always felt that length has to be earned. If you need more length to tell a story that's complex, then you need to have that length — I once turned an entire issue of The New Yorker over to one 25,000 word piece, as I felt it was such an important piece of investigative journalism. But one of the things that I learned at The Daily Beast was that 800 words was the sweet spot. The irony is that you need to be really good to do the 800 word pieces. I found that the more expertise and seasoning that a writer had, the more likely they were able to do a fantastically high-traffic piece that was packed with expertise. The best newsroom, for me, is to have kids with reportorial energy combined with seasoned writers who have the kind of access to get information to get, say, the head of the NYPD on the phone that the young kids won’t yet have.

Does the lack of editors on Substack concern you? I think editors make the writing better, and I think a lot about how I should probably have one, but I kind of do it on my own, normally very late at night, and they are (deservedly) expensive for a one-woman show, which Substack is for most people.

I actually do have an editor. And a fact-checker. I am very, very concerned about libel. I do not want to be sued. I treat Substack like news journalism, really. I think editors are vital. As you say, they make the work better. They make sure your argument is really there. They just tighten up everything.

It’s interesting to me how fact-checkers are seen as a luxury, now. I did a piece of work for a big corporation a few years ago, and when I asked them for a fact-checker, they waved me away and said to trust myself. And I thought, it’s nothing to do with whether or not I trust myself! It’s about the integrity of the work, doing due diligence, protecting everyone involved from libel.

They absolutely are seen as a luxury and that’s terrifying. Zuckerberg coming out and saying no fact-checking — he's just taken the mask off. [In her letter of last week, Brown quotes the Nobel prize-winning investigative reporter/ media founder, Maria Ressa: “Mark Zuckerberg has never really understood nor respected the role journalism plays. And Facebook became the world’s gatekeeper. And that’s part of the reason we’ve seen the corruption of our public information ecosystem.”] He’s saying the quiet part aloud. Which is that it is now perfectly okay to basically say, truth doesn't matter, make up your own mind. It’s entered the bloodstream in a way that's very fearful, and it's up to the people who do care — and there are great many journalists who do, thank god for them — to push past that.

How do we hold the line? I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about this, because I launched a conference in my husband’s name, called the Truth Teller's Summit. I really want to nurture journalists, because I happen to love journalists. I always have. And I admire them. I think there's a lot of incredible talent out there and I think it's critical that we support them.

Podcasting alarms me, sometimes. I don’t currently do a podcast, because I worry that I will say something that I would have, as a writer, checked and been careful about. And when you are talking, you're much more likely to make a mistake.

Tina Brown with her daughter, Isabel, by Annie Leibovitz, in the early ‘90s

We did have a fact-checker on The High Low. But we were always terrified of getting something wrong, so you’re probably right to be alarmed. A recent BBC investigation into Stephen Bartlett’s chart-topping podcast, Diary of a CEO accused the podcast of sharing health misinformation after Bartlett hosted guests who said that Covid was an engineered bio-weapon and that autism can be cured by diet. Bartlett isn’t a journalist and doesn’t pretend to be. But he has a very large team of people making the podcast with him, so a producer could furnish him with facts, or a counter-argument. When you’re that much of a juggernaut, do you think you have a responsibility to interrogate claims that might be divisive, or spurious?

I think we've got to discriminate between what is journalism and what is quote marks, ‘content’. It’s merged in people's minds. There are these people walking around, these ‘content providers’, calling themselves journalists. And they're not. They've done no research. They do no interrogating. And they're really just simply trading access for interviews. And somehow there has to be some kind of discernment. How do you create the discernment?

When I joined The Sunday Times in 2013, journalists there would talk wistfully about the black cabs and long lunches; that side of the media which is in full flow in the late ‘80s/ early ‘90s of The Vanity Fair Diaries. It wasn’t just about the lavishness, but also the shared nature of everything. Pre-internet (particularly, pre-social media), people were watching and reading things at the same time, but now we are in the chaos era of consumption, where there are myriad sources of (often contradictory) information, and we all consume it at different times. Does this depress you? Or do you think, it is what it is, let’s roll with it?

Both. I think of those Vanity Fair days as the dinosaur days. They were the great days of Condé Nast, and they were so much fun. It wasn't just about the expense accounts, it was about the freedom and joy of only having to really think about the content, the hiring of the writers, how your cover was going to look, and what was going to be in the magazine. I spent my time finding talent, growing talent, splashing the work, and getting people excited about it. The offices that I had at Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Tatler, and The Daily Beast were these humming thrives of fun, creative people who couldn't wait to get to the office. It was a bloody Camelot!

And now it's kind of a miserable angst-ridden profession, where everybody sits there going on about the business model. And journalists are terrible business people! Their head is in getting a great story, and pursuing it, and making people read it. And I feel sorry for the younger journalists who've never experienced that because they’re sitting on their own on Zoom all day without a colleague to turn to and discuss their story. I don’t know if that will ever get fixed.

I feel a certain amount of rage at the sabotage of our world. And it was self-sabotage, too, by the way. In the early 2000s, when the digital revolution happened, the media was supine. It lay on its back and said, Oh, yes, come and take our content for free. We won't charge you anything for it! We're so excited that we're going to get all this traffic! Except that all the traffic got monetized and not by the media. So then the media suddenly found themselves with a business that had started to crumble. And now with the advent of AI, the very same people who did that to us are going to be doing it all over again, and with even more reckless disregard.

Silicon Valley treats journalists like content providers, who can be paid chicken feed while they clean up on all the profits. I think that's an enraging injustice, actually, and I don't know if there's any kind of fightback at this point. In this current era, the Elon Musk era as one has to think of it, it’s become brazen. There was a kind of a period where the digital people pretended to care about what was happening. They pretended to mind if their platforms were being abused.

You told The Guardian in 2023 that investigative reporting is at risk due to “corporate timidity”. Does it come down to budgets?

It comes down to greed, in the sense that yes, it's cheaper, but it’s timidity as well. Someone I know in podcasting told me this horrible phrase the other day: “We don’t have appetite for this”. Someone had done an investigative podcast, they’d aired it, then there was a complaint from one of the people who had been investigated and even though it had been fact-checked — it was watertight! The production company’s response to this legal letter they received, to the producers who had made the show, was “We don’t have appetite for this.” And they just took down the episode. That’s unbelievable! It’s laziness, it’s timidity.

You’ve described yourself as “a magazine romantic” and I am, too. I have always adored magazines, they have been my biggest luxury since I was in my early teens, and I never thought the day would come when I only subscribed to just two or three of them. What is the future of magazines?

Sadly, I do think that magazines are mostly done. And it breaks my heart because, like you, I used to have a big pile of magazines to read each month. I don’t subscribe to any now except for The New Statesman, The Atlantic and The New Yorker. But I’ve normally read it all on my phone, by the time I get to the magazine. I think what The Atlantic is doing is very interesting. It has very much reinvented itself, as a magazine, by being multi-platform in its approach, by having a very strong digital platform, hosting conferences, and podcasts. They've done the lateral expansion thing, which is the only way magazines can survive. Condé Nast, unfortunately, were absolutely antediluvian at that. They never mastered that. The New Yorker has now, which is why it’s doing well, it’s profitable at least.

I actually advocated doing all those things in 1998, and S.I. Newhouse had no interest. I mean, I remember writing him this long memo, which said that The New Yorker should be more than a magazine. It should be, I said, the HBO of print. It should have a radio show — because in those days there were no podcasts — it should have book publishing, it should do TV shows’. And he actually memorably replied, which was a knife in my side, “Tina, stick to your knitting”.

I once had the same! But instead of stick to your knitting, it was stick to my high heels.

It makes you want to blow a gasket! And I did blow a gasket. I left, but unfortunately, I left to go work for Harvey Weinstein, which was probably the dumbest career move in anybody's existence.

You’ve spoken very honestly about the PTSD that followed your time working for Weinstein at Talk magazine, so I don’t want to dig into that. But I do want to know what you think will happen with Vogue when Anna Wintour leaves. Will it remain culturally relevant?

Yes, because it has the Met Ball and videos and events, all those things that make a big brand. Also, I think that women are always going to be interested in fashion in some shape or form. I suspect that the print magazine will become the sort of couture line of the brand, rather than the most important thing about it.

I can’t think of a single friend of mine who reads magazines anymore, except at the hairdresser. It’s mad when you consider what status symbols magazines once were — the PapaRazzi bags! Those clutch bags in the ‘80s that told the world that you were a Vogue reader, or you were a Harper’s reader. There was a status to it, you wanted the world to know, I read this magazine. None of the corner shops around me even sell magazines any more.

None of the newsstands near me have any magazines, either. I still buy hard copies of the newspapers, but I am reading them less and less. There used to be a time when not a day went by that I didn’t open the print issue. It would be, what have I missed, what have I missed? But the truth is, I'm finding that most of what I now read in the papers, I have already read online.

I think reading things online is a much more siloed reading experience. We just flick to the verticals we’re interested in, right? So you don’t get that mix of news like you do in a printed newspaper, where you learn about things out of your comfort or interest zone.

Definitely. I know that when I read the print edition, that kind of intellectual serendipity is far more nurturing, or nourishing, than just quickly looking at all the headlines, scrolling down them. I can’t remember the last time I actually went to a homepage, rather than straight to the section. Another thing I really miss about print is that digital journalism has no hierarchy of excitement. A front page is a meaningful thing, a big front page with a big headline and a big picture is this great moment that communicates excitement and communicates choice. This is the story of the day, this is what you should care about the most.

When I started The Daily Beast, one of the things I had to get over was that you couldn’t elevate one thing on the site, you couldn’t give it over to one thing, to communicate which story you thought that people should care about the most. I did adjust to it, by creating a sort of a carousel where I actually cared about the order of the stories, doing it manually, as opposed to having it just algorithmically dictated.

If people aren't spending on magazines anymore, what are they spending on? Substacks? I spend a lot on Substack and newspaper subs.

Yes. Podcasts are very popular now, too. I never was a podcast person. I've really only become a podcast person in the last year and a half. I feel that I can't keep up unless I’m listening to certain podcasts now, like The News Agents. But at least I'm not sitting on my butt just looking at my phone. I mean, it's another way to take information in. But how much information can we process?

You mentioned earlier that people are scrolling past the headlines, they aren’t actually reading many of the articles. They’ll see that Elon Musk is doing something enraging, but they haven't actually read the story. Do you know that expression, TL;DR?

No.

It stands for: too long; didn't read. I see it a lot on social platforms now. Someone will ask TL;DR in the comments section and someone else will reply with a little summary. It happens on The New Yorker, it happens on The Cut, in their comments section. Someone will summarise a 5,000 or 10,000 word piece, in a few sentences.

Wow, I love TL;DR. That's really great. That's really great.

I thought you’d find it depressing. I find it quite depressing!

Well, I love The Week magazine, which sort of does that. The Week was ahead of its time.

I love The Week. My mum just subscribed my daughter to The Week Junior, and honestly I learn as much from it as I do the adult version. You know the guy who invented The Week now does a daily newsletter called The Knowledge? It’s got a huge readership. So clearly newsletters are the future, if you and Jon Connell are doing it.

That sounds great, I must look at The Knowledge. Here's the other question. How many of these newsletters can you tolerate coming into your email?

So this is a really interesting one. I think we might be at a tipping point. I feel like I probably subscribe to too many, and now that almost every writer I know is on there, I could reasonably subscribe to 50 more. I think the paywall is an issue. Who can afford to subscribe to multiple Substacks?

I think bundling may well be the way to go. Which is to say, okay, there are these six writers and you know, there's an affinity here, so let’s bundle them.

Imagine if you were bundled with someone whose writing you hated.

Well, indeed. And actually, I'm kind of enjoying being a lone ranger on Substack. There are people who are starting things that are really working. Bari Weiss is one of them, with The Free Press. The other person I really admire is Imran Ahmed, who does The Business of Fashion.

Would you ever expand Fresh Hell into a proper website, like The Free Press, or Vittles?

Possibly. If it looks like there is enough interest in this kind of writing. Listen, as an editor, I can absolutely be breaking news every single day of the week. I still have such a lot of news juice in me that I see 15,000 stories a day and I know exactly who should be writing them. But I'm not, at this point in my life, willing to become one of those people talking about business models. I can't be bothered, frankly, to get back into that, because it takes all the joy of it away. I’m going to leave that to Bari Weiss and Imran Ahmed.

That’s fair enough. Something I’ve found fascinating about the last 6 months - it’s been so quick! - is that I don't know anyone who's still on X. This story is a good example of how deeply depressing it has become. It makes me so sad. It was my favourite platform!

What are they using instead?

Good question. TikTok, definitely. Substack — the way people are using the Notes tool. I think people will be swarming back to Instagram when/if the TikTok ban happens [it was overturned by Trump his first day in office.] But I also think that the obsessive status-updating moment of the 2010s has faded a bit. Or maybe I just don’t see it anymore as I don’t spend much time on socials anymore.

I think that's right. I also think the community of X seems to become so batshit, that what's the point in being in it? Whereas there was a time when no journalist could be off X.

I wanted to ask you about journalistic authority, specifically in the celebrity profile space, where journalists have lost a lot of relevance because the big celebrities don’t actually need traditional media coverage anymore. Taylor Swift is the obvious example, here: no profile could possibly do for Taylor Swift what Taylor Swift could not do in two seconds flat, on her own socials. It makes me think about those iconic profiles like ‘Frank Sinatra Has A Cold’, by Gay Talese — the authority! The level of intimacy!

Once upon a time, the journalist very much held the power. They also got the most incredible access. I spoke at Gail Sheehy’s memorial service recently — she was this terrific ‘80s reporter — and so I re-read quite a lot of her profiles for Vanity Fair, and they were so amazing. She did a profile of Hillary Clinton at the time when Clinton was campaigning for president, and she happened to be interviewing her the week that the Gennifer Flowers scandal broke, when Clinton was outed as having had this affair with this singer, and Gail was standing next to Hillary in the phone box, where’s she’s on the phone, yelling at Bill about Gennifer Flowers. She's completely in there! I was thinking recently that you would never in a million years get such access today.

As tedious as it is to be on the journalistic side, to have publicists ask to see your copy before you go to press, to vet the journalist before they grant the interview, I understand how we got here. The way that things travel now: one bad interview or one flippant quote can yield years of hate for the talent on the internet. I get why a lot (not all!) celebrities give these anodyne answers. Because it's so high stakes now.

That’s absolutely right. That’s what we saw with Kamala Harris. She very much took that view of, interviews can do nothing but kill me, right? But on the other hand, her fear of doing them also killed her, because you had Donald Trump doing three hours with Joe Rogan and millions of people listening to the whole damn thing.

Joe Rogan. The great curiosity of our time.

I'm astounded by anyone being willing to talk for two, or three hours, or indeed wanting to listen for three hours to Joe Rogan. But it seems like they do. I think because we live in this bitesize society, now, there’s something soothing about a continuous narrative.

It’s not just high stakes for the celebrity being profiled, though, it’s high stakes for the journalist, too, to write about certain figures with these ardent fandoms. I know several journalists who deleted their Twitter accounts after writing about the Depp/ Heard trial. Or music writers who have been doxxed and sent death threats by fans for giving a popstar a middling review. It’s definitely having an impact on what people feel able to write about, and have the strength to take on. Do you think that journalists need to toughen up, or is it, kind of, fucked?

The latter. Trashed. I mean, one of the things that's been awful about the last few years is that a journalist can be screwed by one sentence. But I think that era is beginning to fade a bit. I have this feeling that people are less fearful, a feeling of like people are coming out of that. One good thing, I suppose, about the change in mood, shall we say [in the States] is that I think people are feeling a little less fearful about the whole cancel era.

I like your optimism. Hugh Grant has a list of things he hates, like backpacks, water bottles, AirPods. What do you hate about modern media?

Certain stories that just seem to worm their way into the consciousness. Like, I don't care about Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni.

I’m obsessed with that story. The figures flying around!

Nothing is going to make me read any more about that. That’s the one I just don't give a toss about. And I am usually such a junk consumer. I will read about every murder scandal, but Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni are off my list. As are most stories about crypto. I could care about crypto. I should care about crypto. I do not care about crypto. So, you know, there are things that just you make a decision about. My decisions are that those effing things do not interest me. It's amazing how the royals continue to interest people. I think they are at their least interesting moment.

Last question. If you were 25 now (the age at which, rather astoundingly, you became the editor of Tatler) would you still be angling to be a magazine editor? And if not, what would 25-year-old Tina be doing instead?

Well, I think Tina at 25 is Izzy, my daughter, who at 34, is a producer of documentaries. She has an incredible story sense and an amazing copy judgment. She is such a tough editor! She's just like her dad. Not to mention the fact she's also an extraordinary finder of things. Harry always used to say she should join the CIA. I think that she would undoubtedly have been an editor in my era and if I was starting out now, I'd be doing documentaries. Or I’d be the ringmaster of a circus.

Knowing you and your ability to pivot, ringmaster will be coming up next. Thank you, Tina, as always, for your time and your energy.

Pandora, it’s always so fun to talk to you.

1. Her iconic magazine covers included a naked, pregnant Demi Moore, on Vanity Fair, in 1991 - it sold 250,000 more copies than usual and was wrapped in plain white paper everywhere outside of NYC