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The last time Tina Brown launched a magazine – Talk in 1999 – she held a celebrity-stuffed party on an island off Manhattan where the fireworks were bigger, louder and longer than those at Rupert Murdoch's wedding just a few weeks later. To celebrate her first issue as editor-in-chief of Newsweek, earlier this month, Brown ditched the party idea altogether, instead inviting some of the world's richest, poorest and most-oppressed women to talk about their rights in a midtown Manhattan hotel for the Women In The World summit. The Murdochs were there too to discuss China, their marriage having outlived Talk by a whole decade. The magazine cost its backers a rumoured $100m (£62m) over two seemingly spendthrift years. After its closure in early 2002, Brown hosted a chat show and wrote a biography of Princess Diana before setting up the webzine, the Daily Beast, in 2008.
The past decade has seen an explosion of online social networking that now makes celebrity parties seem, well, old school, and the print media decimated by websites from Google to Gawker and the Huffington Post. But what hasn't changed since 1999 is Brown's ability to attract headlines, both good and bad. Brown is catnip to print journalists and the more vicious bloggers. When the Beast team merged with the even more loss-making Newsweek last November, Gawker ran a much-read piece comparing Brown with a hagfish, "a blind, slimy, deepwater eel-like creature that darts into the orifices of its prey and devours them, alive, from the inside".
Brown is, inevitably, dismissive of these attacks."Snark is the medium of the day," she says when we meet over a hotel breakfast (egg white omelette with bacon and butterless toast). In her transatlantic, staccato voice, she says she hasn't read the stories anyway. "I don't have Google alert because it just distracts the brain. At the end of the day, we have bigger things to worry about than that, quite frankly. We have a magazine to remake."
The task she faces in remaking Newsweek is one of the biggest of a 35-year career that has included taking on a failing Tatler when she was just 25, as well as editing Vanity Fair (1984 to 1992) and the New Yorker (1992 to 1998). In a world where advertising and circulation revenues have plummeted and the future of news magazines looks dire,Newsweek's losses are estimated at more than $20m a year. Sidney Harman, a 92-year-old technology mogul paid $1 for the 78-year-old magazine last summer. He contacted Brown soon after.
So, the question is, after extolling the virtues of the 24/7 nature of the internet for the past two years, why would Brown and her billionaire backer Barry Diller return to print?
Manhattan gossip suggests Diller simply wants to distance himself from the loss-making Beast, but he has a funny way of showing it, if so. As well as continuing to fund the merged firm, he will provide office space in his new Frank Gehry-designed offices in the next month. Brown says of her two new co-owners: "I've got two guys who've expressed their commitment and no one expects it to be quick. I think I'm much safer with them than I am with some big amorphous company that could just pull the plug any time."
She has compared taking on Newsweek with rolling a boulder up a hill. Does she still think that? "Yes, I am that ant rolling the boulder up the hill," she laughs. "Not that the Beast was easy but it was unencumbered. There's a legacy at Newsweek but . . . I have an appetite for it. I really do love journalism."
Her first issue, including a glowing cover interview with Hillary Clinton, showed lots of Brown magazine hallmarks: mixing Newsweek's traditional political fare with glossy photojournalism, health, fashion, food and travel. "News and pleasure are a good combination," she says.
More than 50 Newsweek jobs were cut before Brown joined and she has set about hiring veteran, and hardly cheap, writers such as Howard Kurtz, Peter Boyer and Andrew Sullivan. At Talk, writers were paid $5 per word and, although Brown says, "that payday has gone", the Beast typically pays $350 for each article it runs – far more than its rivals.
"As a writer myself, I cannot look other writers in the face and ask them to do things for nothing," says Brown. "In the same way, I wouldn't ask my dentist to give me a free filling. Writing is a profession and you should have respect for that and should pay for it."
Which brings us neatly to the Huffington Post, whose eponymous founder Arianna has been much criticised for failing to pay writers after selling the site to AOL for $315m. The two women are often written about together. "Nobody writes about the editors of Slate and Politico like that," sighs Brown. "I guess it's like girl-on-girl action. Everybody likes girl-on-girl action."
So how does she get on with the former conservative commentator turned web queen?
"Arianna is a really old girlfriend and I've known her for 30 years. I've always been fond of her and I think her success is marvellous. I really do. I'm very admiring of what she's done."
After the Post sale, the 57-year-old Brown hosted a lunch for Huffington, who also agreed to appear at her Women In The World summit. Would she like to emulate Huffington's success, I ask? "Sounds like a very nice happy ending. She'll be paying for the next lunch." This best friends scenario doesn't quite ring true for one long-time friend of both women, who laughs and describes them as "total rivals . . . whatever else, Arianna helps you realise you've got to be at the top table too".
Brown, a darling of the media world with husband Harry Evans when Huffington was still better known for her politics, is twice accosted by other people during our 50 minute interview. She engenders loyalty among the people she works with. "I try to do the best job I can to bring a spotlight to the people who work for me. I've always tried to make the writers who work for me more successful than they were before."
Asked why she never followed the trend for eponymous sites on the web, she says: "I did not want my name to be the name on the website and you know why? I think that websites called after the person running it somehow minimises the staff working for them. I wanted to attract the very best writers and it wasn't about me. It wasn't an extension of myself."
There is a moment's silence after this, until Brown goes on to talk about the "inside joke" of naming her website after the paper featured in her favourite novel about journalism, Scoop. In one scene the hero writes of how what a "pleasurable thing it is to spend other people's money".
"I certainly subscribe to that," laughs Brown. Don't all journalists? "Absolutely right."
Famously tough, the only time she bridles is at the suggestion made by Slate writer, Jack Shafer, that the summit to celebrate women is "blatantly exploitative". "What does he mean? How can he possibly say that? Exploitative of who?" she splutters. "The notion that this is PR is sort of obscene . . . it's a truly belittling thing to the women who care.
"Let them get on and do what they want to do for the world. Ultimately, the Women in the World summit is about anything but . . . that. Every one of those faces, nearly all of them you've never heard of before. I'm really proud of that."
The two-day event is indeed impressive, with Brown's team bringing together a diverse array of people. Seeing her at the event, whether gushing over Bill Clinton, chatting with Diller and his wife Diane von Furstenberg, or introducing sponsors to the doctor from Somalia who provides refuge for 100,000 people, Brown is the consummate networker. What does she think of the charge that in the world of Facebook and Twitter, such behaviour is no longer necessary. "You have to do both in this world. Listen, at the Beast, we have this incredible community of interests who want to write and that I've never met. They're not my Rolodex. They just want to be part of it and that's incredibly exciting."
By the end, some $150,000 had been donated.
Her interest in women's issues is typically news-driven. "It's an exciting moment for women. The Arab revolution happened because women are insisting that they are going to be part of this movement for democracy . . . We are right on the zeitgeist . . . But it's not enough to just write about them. We have to really introduce them to people who have influence and money and are opinion formers to help augment their efforts."
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