The Queen of Buzz Goes Silent? Doubtful

She has been lionized and demonized, hailed as the most brilliant editor on either side of the Atlantic and denounced--usually off the record or in stage whispers--as a frosty perfectionist with a rare talent for self-promotion. Yet few would deny that, wherever she has gone, Tina Brown has made the clubby, inbred world of magazine publishing a more colorful, unpredictable place.

Now there will be a new chapter in Brown’s life story, after the suspension last week of Talk magazine, where Brown was founding chairwoman and editor in chief. In a move that made national headlines but surprised few media watchers, the 2-year-old general interest monthly announced that its February issue, currently on newsstands, would be its last.

Talk’s abrupt collapse has left dozens of staffers in New York and Los Angeles looking for work, while across the country a Greek chorus of commentators has arisen to pass judgment on its fate. Was Talk the last gasp of the ‘90s, the inevitable comeuppance to a decade of glitzy shallowness and celebrity worship, as some are asserting?

“Talk was Tina Brown reductio ad absurdum. Talk was style without substance, and Tina Brown was the poster girl” for that, said Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a nonpartisan research and public educational organization that studies the news and entertainment media.

Or was Talk, as Brown and her supporters say, an experiment in cutting-edge journalism and creative multimedia marketing that simply ran out of time and money? “Don’t be fooled by some of the snarkier people who have written about us in the last period,” said Brown, stealing a few minutes between engagements for a cell phone interview from her car in Manhattan on Wednesday. “The fact is we were getting offered terrific pieces, terrific first serials.”

The news of Talk’s demise was made public Friday by officials with Miramax Films, a unit of Walt Disney Co., and Hearst Corp., which had backed the magazine to the tune of an estimated $50 million. Just hours earlier, Talk had hosted a pre-Golden Globe Awards bash at the SkyBar in the Mondrian Hotel on the Sunset Strip, where guests sipped apple martinis and munched on crab cakes and tuna tartar, and Brown circulated as if nothing were amiss. The shutdown, which Miramax Co-Chairman Harvey Weinstein and Brown blamed largely on the national advertising slump since Sept. 11, came as the magazine was boosting its circulation to a hefty 670,000 and, some thought, finally beginning to find a voice and visual style distinct from those of Brown’s previous editorial charges, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker.

It may take awhile before Talk’s legacy can be separated from the intensely mixed feelings of admiration and antipathy, gratitude and resentment that Brown has aroused throughout her working life. Meanwhile, the 48-year-old Brit is pondering the next phase of a career that has not only taken her to the Annapurna of her profession but turned her into a member of the very velvet-rope crowd she covered.

Sounding more determined than regretful, Brown said that Talk had “left an appetite” for “a new, sophisticated outlet for writers and photographers who had something a little more counterintuitive to say.” “I know that that need is [still] there,” she said. “All the writers who were writing for me are calling me and saying, ‘I don’t know where to place my piece, I don’t know where to call, because there is no place to place my piece.’”

But did those individual pieces add up to a coherent identity for Talk? “I felt the magazine very much had a voice,” Brown replied. “It’s amazing the kind of response we’ve had in the last 24 hours. I talked to a publisher who said to me, ‘The incredible thing was, Talk was the magazine that the media buyers read. Even if they didn’t buy it, they read it.’ You know what I’m saying? And that’s how I began at Vanity Fair. It takes time. We were two years in. It took four years for ‘Seinfeld’ to get an audience.”

Launched amid stratospheric expectations and not a little hyperbole--one British writer declared it “the media event of the year, if not the decade”--Talk was touted as a perfect union of transatlantic journalistic moxie and Hollywood big bucks. With Brown as its aggressive, well-connected editor and Disney and Hearst’s deep pockets, Talk looked primed to profit from the financial and creative synergies of two multimedia giants. Star writers were hired to do articles that, it was hoped, might someday morph into books, movies and other intellectual properties. A Miramax spokesman said that three Talk magazine articles had been optioned for Miramax movie deals.

A lavish start-up party at Liberty Island in Manhattan drew guests from across the political and entertainment spectra, a testament to Brown’s bipartisan social skills. A former editor of Britain’s the Tatler, which she transformed from a stodgy social register into a sharply written high-society gossip sheet, Brown understood that while Henry Kissinger, Madonna and Salman Rushdie might belong to separate cultural tribes, they’re part of the same celebrity elite of newsmakers and opinion-shapers.

Asked whether her own celebrity might have been a distraction for the magazine, Brown said the attention she drew was “a double-edged thing.” “At the end of the day, it also meant a lot of terrific people were attracted to the magazine because of it,” she said. “The fact is, because of the energy and heat around the magazine, we got offered a caliber of material that we certainly wouldn’t have been offered if myself and [Talk President] Ron Galotti had not been so well-known in our industry.”

Brown’s track record ensured that Talk would generate plenty of buzz, a term so often associated with Brown that some think she coined it. After resurrecting the moribund Vanity Fair in the 1980s, she’d gone to another ailing publication, the New Yorker, in the ‘90s and refashioned it from a leisurely patrician journal into a hipper, punchier, more rough-edged magazine targeted at a younger, richer audience. Some thought the new New Yorker was smart and forthright; others found it trashy and insensitive. Circulation rose by a third, to 800,000, but the magazine kept losing money.

In some ways, Talk attempted to combine the seriousness and polished writing of the New Yorker with the timeliness and cheek of Vanity Fair. When it folded, it was still struggling to find a comfortable middle between eye candy and sterner stuff, between paparazzi shots of Courtney Love and a revealing look at the Nepal royal family massacre. The premiere issue’s cover story was an interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton, in which the U.S. Senator and former first lady disclosed her belief that her husband’s philandering had its roots in his troubled childhood. But few other Talk stories reverberated in the wider culture.

“This just happened to be a terrible time, not only to start a magazine, but also to keep one going,” said Clay Felker, a professor in the graduate school of journalism at UC Berkeley. “When you’re a journalist, particularly an editor, it’s like being a coach in the NFL: You win some, and then you lose some, and then you’ve got another job. And Tina had three big wins.”

Felker said he doesn’t think it’s possible anymore to start a general interest magazine that’s not connected to a television program (such as Oprah Winfrey’s O and Martha Stewart Living), which allows for cross-promotion. Brown conceded that may be true. Yet she said that Talk’s multimedia marketing strategy was beginning to pay dividends by offering writers “greater leverage and exposure.”

But Talk also was dogged by criticism that the magazine was too subservient to its sponsors’ other corporate interests--especially whenever Miramax stars were featured in its pages, as they often were.

Judy Bachrach, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and author of an unflattering book about Brown and her husband, editor Harold Evans, said that Brown’s reign at the top of the magazine world is now over. “She’s very much like an actress whose time is up,” Bachrach said. “There are always actors and actresses who are perfect for certain moments in time, Julia Roberts or whatever. Tina was emblematic of a very certain period, and Tina couldn’t transcend that period.”

But political commentator Arianna Huffington, a longtime friend, said the magazine’s folding may be a “blessing in disguise” for Brown. “I really feel that for her this could be a new, wonderful beginning,” Huffington said. “I’ve said to her that I would love to see her go back to writing. This could be her Act III.”

For now, other units of Talk Media will go forward, with Brown continuing to serve as chairwoman of Talk Miramax Books, the company’s book-publishing arm. Owned by Miramax Films, the unit is scheduled to publish books by former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright.

Brown acknowledged that many people have been urging her to publish a diary she has kept for years. Could the Queen of Buzz be ready to tell all? Brown isn’t sure.

“At the moment,” she said, “I certainly don’t want to overload my plate.”