Mixed Signals: Zeitgeist genius Tina Brown on Meghan Markle, Vanity Fair, and whether we still need editors

Max Tani:
Welcome to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media where we are tracking the wild changes in this media age. I’m Max Tani, media editor at Semafor, and with me as always, of course, is our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith.

Ben Smith:
Hi, Max.

Max Tani:
This week we’re talking to another editor, and that is Tina Brown. Tina, of course, is the iconic former top editor of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair and chronicler of the British Royal family, and she is now writing an increasingly popular Substack called Fresh Hell. We’ll ask her about how her own trajectory reflects the kind of changing media landscape, whether magazines still matter, and who is advising Harry and Meghan behind the scenes?

Ben Smith:
Yeah, we should also try to get some story assignments out of her. She has legendarily had her finger on the pulse for her whole career.

Max Tani:
Well, we’ll ask her to do Ben’s job for him and more right after the break. Back in kind of the peak magazine, the heyday of magazines, people would describe the editors-in-chief as imperial editors lording over the realm of writers, being able to kind of dispense cultural wisdom, and being able to direct the conversation in ways just on their impulses and whims. You’re an editor-in-chief, would you describe yourself as an imperial editor?

Ben Smith:
No, that’s the dream. Now we’re just herding cats all day, both in terms of, I think a world where writers and journalists have much more individual power, and then also no one publication can really shape the culture the way these old magazines used to.

Max Tani:
Well, one imperial editor who shaped the culture at various different magazines, whether it was serving as editor-in-chief of The New Yorker or of Vanity Fair or of the short-lived Talk magazine was, of course, Tina Brown. Maybe the dictionary definition of an imperial editor, at this point. I kind of caught the very, very tail end of that. I feel like I started in magazines just as Graydon Carter was kind of wrapping up his time at Vanity Fair. But you were around in New York at the time when there were still imperial editors lording over their realms. Who is Tina? Give us a little bit of her background and why it’s important that we’re talking to her today.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I mean, Tina was just a phenom at a moment when it was big news who was going to be the editor of these publications. They were huge, powerful jobs, with hugely successful businesses around them, dispensing money, as well as all those other things. And she was an upstart British editor who’d run Tatler, which you may not be a big reader of, I was not, and had arrived in 1984 to take over and really revive and create what we know as Vanity Fair, which was this celebrity focused kind of buzz machine that took the culture by storm. And then, the real scandal was in 1992 when S.I. Newhouse, who had run the New Yorker, which was kind of run as a library where everybody spoke to each other in whispers, took over the New Yorker and they stopped publishing 40,000 word articles about obscure birds, started writing more about politics, about celebrities.
It was a scandal at the time. I think in the end, I think David Remnick, the current editor, would say this too, she created the modern New Yorker and laid the groundwork for its future success. And then, she jumped, in 1998, probably the last year in which this possibly sounded like a good idea, for various reasons, with Harvey Weinstein to create a magazine called Talk, which was going to merge the kind of highbrow New Yorker, Vanity Fair stuff with a kind of more lowbrow zeitgeist celebrity thing. And that not work, but had a legendary party on Liberty Island, which they rented out, because that’s how magazines worked back then.
She never got out of the game. She started The Daily Beast in 2008. She’s also probably the leading chronicler of the Royals just on the side. Her book Vanity Fair Diary is amazing, but she also has a big book called the Diana Chronicles, if you’re into that stuff. And now, she has a Substack that you have to read called Fresh Hell, because that’s the only thing left to do is to have a Substack.

Max Tani:
I mean, hearing the kind of long resume and having it end and now she has a Substack with your cousin and everybody on Twitter and... I mean, is that sad? Is it a sign of the times? Is it actually kind of good in the sense that does it connote the fact that quality on these platforms has actually gone up significantly? So much so that the former editor of The New Yorker feels like it’s a worthy place to put stuff? What do you make of that?

Ben Smith:
It’s funny, when I said it, it did sort of sound sad, but I didn’t mean it that way. I’m thrilled that she has a Substack and there is something about this moment in which it’s so individualized. You want to know what Tina Brown thinks, and you don’t want it filtered through a publication and a brand. Although, you gather from her Substack that she misses the days when she could dispatch great writers halfway around the world on a whim to chase some whisper, which you cannot do on Substack. But I think that’s sort of what I want to talk to her about is that funny arc from leading the most powerful institutions in media to being one voice among a million on this platform.

Max Tani:
Well, Tina’s waiting for us. Let’s bring her on. Thank you so much for joining us, Tina.

Tina Brown:
I’m thrilled to be with you, really.

Ben Smith:
We introduced you by talking about your genuinely legendary magazine career chronicled in Vanity Fair Diaries and elsewhere, and Max’s sort of pity for me that I don’t get to live in the era of the imperial Editor. But there is something about how that kind of huge role of an editor directing people, directing a publication, directing the zeitgeist has sort of collapsed into everyone’s an individual voice. And I’m curious how you’re finding that?

Tina Brown:
Yeah, and every business model is a tin cup. There is that, too. Well, actually, I mean, I’ve sort of moved on. I mean, I suppose you could say that I was the early adopter because Talk magazine kind of collapsed at the beginning of the 2000s. So I went on my odyssey and kind of found my own life and changed my ways and did other things. So actually I’m fine with it. I mean, I’m not sitting here yearning for a town car to take me to the Four Seasons for lunch. I don’t even have lunch anymore. I mean, I can’t even remember the last time I had lunch because I’m always there working through it. There is also something quite liberating about this time. I mean, I love having my Substack. It’s mine.
I love the statistics, for instance, because at Condé Nast they almost hid you from the figures. It was one of the most ridiculous things in the world. You had no idea what was going on in the company. You were just somebody who sort of churned out your magazine. Great luxury in some ways. But I like being a sort of freelance producer of my own content. I mean, maybe I’m just at a time in my life when I’m fine with that. I don’t know how I’d feel if I was younger. My daughter is in her 30s and she just feels like, “Oh my God.” When she reads the Vanity Fair Diaries, it’s like she doesn’t lust for that kind of big budget stuff, but she lusts for the action. She lusts for the magazine office, the fun of having an entity where people would come in and out and it was an action show and it was a real lot of fun those days, I must say. We had a lot of fun.

Ben Smith:
I mean, I think the thing those magazines could do and that maybe you more than anybody could do was capture and direct the zeitgeist, say, “This is what’s happening in the country.” Can anyone do that anymore?

Tina Brown:
Well, I miss that because, as I’m only kind of dependent on myself, I can’t sort of direct the troops to go out and find it all, because there’s so many great stories now that, I mean, it’s a fire hose of incredible stories now. I mean, too many great stories now. So you do miss that of being able to match the story with what’s happening. And that’s what I miss, I guess, it’s that matching, it’s thinking that writer should be doing that story now. So yeah, I do miss that.
But I mean, time changes. I mean, we’re in such a transitional era. I mean, I tend to feel that this is still very much the in-between, that there is still something coming that might be able to combine some of those things. And there’s a lot very good stuff happening. I mean, look at all the stuff you’re doing. There’s Semafor and Puck and Substack. I mean, there is stuff happening. I mean, do these things just grow and explode and become the new big huge things? They might. Let’s hope so.

Ben Smith:
Do they re-conglomerate basically is what you’re suggesting and become big things with imperial editors who can boss people around again?

Tina Brown:
Possibly, possibly.

Ben Smith:
Great.

Tina Brown:
You kind of wonder whether it could happen, right? I mean, I could imagine. Yeah, Semafor will rule the world. I mean, you’ll be sitting there. One of the funniest things is when, for about 10 minutes, as you know we owned Newsweek, when I was at the Daily Beast and that we saw all these figures for the sale of Newsweek and there were things... It was looking at that great scene in the Titanic when it goes from the dancing ballroom into the wreck, if you know what I mean.
And looking at the descriptions of the jobs in that era, it was things like Office of the President, three people. So you could imagine this kind of publisher with an office with three people sitting outside. It was office of the Editor-in-Chief, executive assistant, and assistant to the executive assistant of the Editor-in-Chief. And you were thinking like, “Oh my God.” I mean it was like the State Department. It was like there was the State Department. Then there was the executive dining room. Oh my God. I mean that must’ve been a really incredible period is all I can say.

Max Tani:
So obviously there’s no executive dining room for Substack writers or editors, but the writing in Fresh Hell is really fun and it really pops. But the thing that I feel sometimes kind of reading it is I’m like, “Oh man, I wish that I could read this in this beautiful magazine-y format, like the old school kind of Vanity Fair format.” There is something about Substack that flattens. Your Substack looks similar to another Substack that I’ve read. And part of that is kind of purposeful and it’s good and it means that you can start something tomorrow and it looks really great and really professional, but there is a little bit of a uniformity. Do you miss kind of the aesthetics?

Tina Brown:
Terribly, terribly. Yeah, I know. I mean, when I was actually sort of getting the Substack ready, I was trying to do all these design things and constantly being told, “You can’t do that. This is the format. It’s the format.” So I think the thing I do miss about magazines is what I think of as the hierarchy of excitement, where you can decide how big to make something look or how glamorous to make something look. So you’re never really in control of “This is important,” which is what you could do in a magazine. And also, just the fun of looking through pictures and thinking, “That’s a double page spread.”
I’m doing this big conference in London called the Truth Tellers Summit, which is my thing I do for my husband, who was a great crusading editor, Harry Evans, for his legacy. And we do a Reuters photo journalism exhibit, and it was so fun to be kind of looking through those pictures and there was this one great picture of this girl in a ball dress in the ruins in Gaza, and it was such a fantastic picture. I mean, it just had double page spread all over it. But it’s, sadly, and I feel mostly about this for the visual people, I mean, there is no way to really get that kind of theatrical effect anymore for photographs. It’s very kind of “Here’s a picture, here’s a picture, here’s a picture.”
So yeah, I do miss that. But I mean, the sad thing is, do readers miss it? I don’t know. I mean, we’ve all just become such sort of scavengers of info, as it were. We see it on our phone. We’re not thinking about the aesthetics. We’re not missing that pleasure, but I miss that pleasure.

Max Tani:
I think we’re, in some ways, overwhelmed. We’re a bit spoiled. Right? If that Gaza photo is out there, we get instant access to it on social media. We get it on Twitter, on Instagram, and we’re exposed to that in a feed among many other amazing images and, obviously, plenty of garbage, as well. But I feel like it de-emphasizes kind of the importance of images.

Tina Brown:
The specialness. I mean, on the other hand, you could argue it has a far bigger audience, probably, on Instagram. So there is that. But yeah, no, I miss that, but I miss that. But look, I can’t pretend I’m rushing to the newsstand to buy any magazines. I mean, I don’t buy any magazines. That is a fact. I just don’t. It’s all on my phone.

Max Tani:
Well, one of the other things Ben and I were both really curious about, was Vanity Fair, for years, really trafficked in its kind of impressive readership. That was something that obviously made it incredibly valuable to advertisers and to people who wanted to speak with you guys or give you guys access. I’m really curious, it seems like you have quite a successful Substack already, tens of thousands of subscribers, I’m curious if you can share with us who some of your most notable readers are.

Tina Brown:
God, I mean, I wish I’d gone down my list, but, I mean, I get surprised when someone like know [inaudible 00:13:52] suddenly appears as a subscriber or Peter Morgan, someone like that. There are a lot of people reading it who I felt I should go back and check. And the comments are really good, I have to say. To the point that I think, “Wow, who are you? Can I have you to dinner?” I actually piloted the other day a Fresh Hell dining club.

Ben Smith:
Oh, really?

Tina Brown:
Because I just was thinking that’s the human factor that I somewhat miss. But it’s sort of fun to have people around and maybe eventually some subscribers because some of them are so smart that I quite want to meet these guys.

Ben Smith:
And just a last Substack question, I mean, are you thinking about that you’re building a business there?

Tina Brown:
Well, I actually have gone into this purely... it was the one time when kind of a courtship really, because I usually kind of decide what I’m going to do and then I just do it. But I was actually really persuaded into doing it by them. I mean, they kept coming to me and coming to me and actually it was really nice to be so wanted, if you know what I mean. In the end, I just thought, “You know what? I probably should. What’s holding me back?” I am actually quite sort of a slow and painstaking writer. I mean, I’m not someone who could just... I mean, I’m so jealous of Anand Giridharadas, because, I mean, my god, the guy, how does he have so many thoughts and he can pump them out? I’d love to be able to do that. I can’t, and that’s what I regret, that I can’t do it enough to get to these stories.
But who knows? I might. I mean, if it grew enough, I could imagine inviting my community of these amazing subscribers, as I mentioned, to perhaps join and be part of it. But I’m not looking to do that. I mean, I have such an almost antipathy, at this point, to sort of the idea of building a business essentially. I mean, the freedom of not having to have a payroll, any kind of responsibility is very appealing. I don’t know how you feel about it, Ben, but-

Max Tani:
I think Ben dreams of that. I can answer it for him.

Ben Smith:
I kind of like it, but I also have Substack courtship and do occasionally look over the wall. Can you say how much money is it bringing in every month for you, if I may ask?

Tina Brown:
Well, I don’t want to go into the actual figures, but certainly more than if I was writing a column for a newspaper. I mean, it’s a decent amount of money, much more than I expected, to be honest. And I have seen people making a lot of money. The thing is, it’s about volume, I think. I mean, that’s the only problem is the more you do, the more you are sort of willing to keep doing it, the more you bring in. I mean, obviously, and I just wish that I could sort of clone myself and write maybe three times a week and then I would be renting a villa in Sardinia this summer.

Ben Smith:
The next generation of ChatGPT can maybe-

Tina Brown:
Yeah, exactly right.

Ben Smith:
... start generating Tina Brown columns.

Tina Brown:
Exactly right.

Ben Smith:
So I wanted to read you a quote from one of your more recent Substacks. “With her unerring instinct for getting it wrong, Meghan has come out with a show about fake perfection, just when the zeitgeist has turned raucously against it. Trump’s America is a foul-mouthed and disheveled cultural place where podcasters in sweaty T-shirts, crotch rot jeans, and headphones achieve world domination on YouTube.”

Tina Brown:
God, I’m really sorry. I hope you’re not wearing crotch rot jeans this morning. You look very groomed, Ben.

Ben Smith:
I appreciate that. But honestly, that sounded a little self-hating. I mean, you’re out there. It sounded like you have some ambivalence about this form.

Tina Brown:
Well, I don’t know. I mean, look, there’s not much elegance out there. I mean, I wrote this week about how, for self-soothing now, I watch the debates in the House of Commons on whether or not to kill the [inaudible 00:17:35] steel works. Because, oh my God, I watched it for an hour. I found myself sucked into this thing because it was so kind of new and rare at the moment just to see very smart, substantial, educated people having a very civil argument about something of importance to the country and coming to, actually, the wrong position, I think, but in the right way. And I miss that, I do. I mean, I’m so tired of foul-mouthed Marjorie Taylor Greene. I mean, it’s an uncouth culture we’re living in right now, and I’m just old enough to remember the days when people did have a few manners, and I feel strongly about manners, actually.
I mean, I wrote about that too, about Reinaldo Herrera that died recently. He was this big socialite in Manhattan, but he had these exquisite manners and you had to ask yourself, “What are manners for?” Manners are actually there to protect the other person. It’s not some kind of high-falutin pretentious thing to have manners. The thing about manners is it stops the other person feeling like crap. It’s like if you are sitting next to someone and you talk to them nicely and then you talk to the other person, everybody feels included. I mean, it’s not some old-fashioned etiquette thing. It’s actually just making shy people, people who are not that self-confident, feel better about themselves or write a thank you letter when someone has actually killed themselves to put on a good evening. It can be an email, but it’s like I just do treasure people who have some manners, and I recognize the people who do, and I have a fierce private hatred for those who don’t.

Max Tani:
So we have to take a quick break, but we’ll be right back with Tina Brown. So the Meghan we were referring to in that quote that Ben read is, of course, Meghan Markle, and that was from one of the columns that you wrote about her, but I was just kind of curious if you could bring us a little bit behind the scenes. I mean, what is the response that you get to writing about Meghan Markle? Obviously, she’s a subject of incredible fascination. She has actually, despite the fact that a lot of people have joked about her Netflix shows, and you wrote a pretty brutal take down of it, and obviously she had the unsuccessful podcast, but now actually, it seems like looking at the podcast charts, her recent show about female CEOs has actually seemingly done quite well. I’m curious what the response has been to your writing about Meghan and just take us behind the scenes a little bit about what happens after you publish a column like that.

Tina Brown:
Well, I mean, I get a lot of response. I mean, it does very well. Anytime I write about the Royals, it does do very well, because it is a bit one of my topics, because I wrote The Palace Papers. I mean, obviously, there are Meghan lovers and Meghan haters. I mean, The Palace just doesn’t really think about Meghan anymore. It’s almost like she’s gone. And I think the tragic aspect is Harry. I mean, the thing about Meghan is she’s really not bad at anything that she does. I mean, she has a huge kind of influence and following, if you like. It seems like when she puts on a shirt or whatever or carries a handbag, it sells out, which means that she clearly has a following of people who really like what she stands for, in some ways. Her problem is just that she is so ADD. I mean, she just never stops making announcements and never really sort of follows through.
It’s like, “Whoops, I’m going to be a cooking show,” “Nah, I’ve going to be a podcaster,” and “Hello, hello. I’ve got a beauty line.” I mean, it’s like just do one of those things, do it really well, and then do something else. She’s weirdly panic-stricken in her business model in some way. Maybe she’s just so devoid of self-confidence that she’s always trying. She’s trying to be an instant Beyonce or instant Michelle Obama without the background, essentially, that has built those people, those very, very strong structures on which they stand. So that’s really been her problem. I think if she’d simply succeeded at one thing and then had done another thing, I think she’d be in a much, much better place. But she’s enormously, frankly, sort of shallow in her approach to the work she does.

Max Tani:
Who do you get the sense is in her inner circle who is advising her on some of the moves that she’s been making?

Tina Brown:
Well, what I hear from everyone is that she’s unadvisable, and that is the issue. She’s had a lot of good people willing to give advice to her. But what has irritated the people who do, and big people who do, is that they sit with her and they give her very good advice, and she kind of appears to be extremely motivated by it, and then she doesn’t do it and does something completely else. She’s sort of worn out her advisory circle, essentially, who just feel like, “Well, what’s the point? She’s not going to do it.” And unfortunately, she’s the major advisor to Harry. So, I mean, she doesn’t take advice and he only takes hers. So that’s not a very good combination really for either of them.

Ben Smith:
On the other sort of, and maybe more significant great royal mess of the recent generation, I was really surprised by that piece you wrote recently, and I admit I’m not following this super closely, but suggesting that Prince Andrew, that his story requires a new inspection. And you wrote this great line, “Memo to Vanity Fair’s respected, departing editor, Radhika Jones.” God, if you ever called me respected, that’s brutal.

Tina Brown:
Well, I was trying to be courteous.

Ben Smith:
“Blow out your last issues budget, sending a super sleuth to Perth to report out the way the perplexing Virginia Giuffre story is all about.” Do you think that the media has gotten the Epstein story wrong in some really significant way?

Tina Brown:
I don’t think we’ve got the Epstein story wrong. No. I mean, Epstein was a very sinister, deeply terrible person, I think. I don’t think we got Epstein wrong, and I don’t think we got the Andrew story wrong, too. I mean, Andrew is one of the most... he has the worst judgment in the world. He’s an idiot. He’s kind of loathsome in a thousand ways. It’s just possible though, that he wasn’t lying about Virginia Giuffre. I mean, that’s one of the things in life. It’s like sometimes Trump tells the truth, but the thing is he’s a total liar, so why would you believe him? Sort of the same thing with Andrew.
So I don’t know. I’ve always found the Giuffre story just interesting. I always wanted to interview the husband. The story was that if she left Epstein, she went to Australia, and then she never came back because she met this guy, and somehow you never really learned the full [inaudible 00:24:38]. The story might be exactly as she’s portrayed it, but it was a strange thing to do to post pictures of herself black and blue on Instagram saying, “I have four days to live.” And then, it turned out that actually there hadn’t been a bus crash of any particular sort of severity, and she’s fine, it seems. So what’s that about? Does that just mean that she’s currently unwell and has done this thing or is there another story there? I just think it deserves a good full-bodied sort of blowout story.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. And there is something that, instead of a great journalist going out to Perth for three months, you’re going to get sleuths on Reddit with incomplete information and on TikTok getting to whatever conclusion they feel like it is.

Tina Brown:
And, well, that’s what I miss, you see. And I miss it, indeed, in my own Substack, because there are times when I do have good instincts for stories, and so I’ll kind of write them in that sort of column form, but longing to be able to have actually a couple of weeks to report it out, and then it’ll be so much stronger and so much better. But there isn’t the time.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. That’s something I noticed about Air Mail, Graydon Carter’s publication, sometimes is like, “Oh my God, this is a great assignment. If only it had 100 times the budget and amount of time.”

Tina Brown:
Right, exactly. That is what we all miss. And, I mean, I think that, frankly, there is a way to do that. I think everybody decides to put their budget where they want to put it, and I definitely think budget with two or three really, really strong reporters, it pays off hugely. Well, you did that very much a BuzzFeed. I mean, you broke so many good stories. I don’t know how many reporters you had, but you had really good investigative reporters there, didn’t you? At BuzzFeed?

Ben Smith:
Yeah, and we spent a lot of money on it that, in the end, we couldn’t afford. I mean, [inaudible 00:26:23].

Tina Brown:
Right. I know, I know.

Ben Smith:
But so in this sort of new era, you called Radhika Jones respected, and they’re hiring a new editor there. Who should they hire?

Tina Brown:
Did you look at the job posting for that job?

Ben Smith:
I did not, I did not.

Tina Brown:
Oh my God. The job posting. My husband wrote this book called Do I Make Myself Clear?, where he would take 3,000 words of corporate gobbledygook and get it down to three sentences. This job posting, I mean, it is like 2,000 words of utter gibberish. So who wrote it? I don’t know. But it’s like they’re advertising for a cyborg or something. I have no idea what they’re advertising for, but this person is supposed to do so many different things. They have to think global and be local. They have to work across markets. They have to be brand specific. I mean, it’s all of these words. I mean, there is no one who could possibly answer that job description.
I mean, I think they need what they always needed, which is an editor. I mean, first and foremost, an editor, not an editorial brand director, but an editor who understands great writers, where to find them, and how to match them, which is what we’re talking about, which is the critical thing, not just hiring writers, but knowing which writers to match to which stories. That’s the critical thing. Has a really strong visual sense, a really strong news sense, able to work on a reduced budget, which is what it is now, and an ability to be something of an impresario for the magazine. Those are the things that you need, essentially.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, that’s a shorter description. Who do you think best fits that description if you’re not available?

Tina Brown:
Well, I think they should have given it to Janice Min seven years ago, because I think that Janice is entrepreneurial in her outlook, and she’s super smart and has never quite had the opportunity to do the deeper news stories. I mean, she’s always been at Hollywood, but I think she’s smarter than that. I don’t think though, anymore, she would come. I think she’s now got her own business, so I don’t think she would do it.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, they probably have to acquire the ankler in the process.

Tina Brown:
Yeah, well indeed, and maybe should. And actually, what I thought they should have done is actually move the locus of Vanity Fair to LA and sort of lean into the LA piece of it, essentially, and make Janice the kind of head. But I think that will never happen in the current Condé Nast structure. That’s what I think they could do. I mean, I started thinking about could Ronan Farrow edit a magazine? I don’t know. Probably not. Could Lauren Sanchez? Probably could actually. But no, I mean, to be serious, I mean, I think David Haskell is a really good editor at New York Magazine. I think Maer Roshan is a really, really good editor at Hollywood Reporter. I think Maer would like to do it probably. And I still think that Maer, even though he’s kind of slightly older school now, he has that hunger for story. He still loves magazines. You’ve got to still kind of love magazines.

Ben Smith:
It does feel like David’s New York has kind of replaced Vanity Fair in the culture a bit, hasn’t it?

Tina Brown:
I must say, I am really impressed at how he always comes up with something I want to read. And, of course, Jeffrey Goldberg has really made The Atlantic a hot magazine. So I mean, this is possible to still have a hot magazine, as we’ve seen. Jeffrey, I don’t think would want Vanity Fair, but he’s, I think, a superb editor. I mean, he just had the luckiest scoop in the world. But, I mean, if Condé Nast I came to Semafor and said, “Okay, so we will acquire Semafor and fold it in,” would you do Vanity Fair?

Ben Smith:
Oof. I mean, it’s funny. I mean, A, people are still upset at me at BuzzFeed for having opposed our acquisition by Disney. I mean, the notion of being folded in that just sounds so uncomfortable physically-

Tina Brown:
I know.

Ben Smith:
... to be folded into a thing and Condé’s approach to these, what do they call them now? Brands, right? That they’re all matrixed and global and cross this and cross that. It is very, very grim.

Tina Brown:
It is grim.

Ben Smith:
That said, there’s no reason you couldn’t say, “Actually, this job should be fun, and this should be one of those fun jobs where you get to do cool stuff and assign great stories.” There’s no rule against that.

Tina Brown:
I think it is a fun job. I think people who say, “Oh, does anybody want it?,” of course they do. I mean, when you think about how there are so many talented sort of small, nuanced, niche things that are out there full of talent, I mean, you’re telling me that none of those people would rather have a budget that is certainly three times bigger than that, and a brand that everybody will answer the phone for, and the ability to assign some really good... find and cultivate and grow some really good writers. I mean, of course, it’s a wonderful job for a younger person, but not someone, I suppose, who’s already moved on to cross the Rubicon.

Ben Smith:
Now that you’re in this Substack ecosystem, I think one of the things you were always great at was spotting rising talent. Is there stuff you’re reading, in particular, stuff you’re seeing that you’d recommend and that you think has whatever is next in it?

Tina Brown:
Well, I mean, I’m a fan of Sean McCreesh, but he’s already been sort of spotted and taken to the New York Times. A very talented young British journalist called Harry Lambert, who I spotted in the New Statesman, who’s really good. I think Jessica Testa’s pretty good, actually, in the New York Times, sort of young. My daughter’s really good, but she’s not a journalist. I wish she would be. She’s a documentarian, which is what people do now because they haven’t got magazines. If she was in my day, she’d have had a magazine by now.

Ben Smith:
And maybe that’s the answer. These documentaries are now what drives the zeitgeist. And so, a big doc on Netflix is what a magazine used to be.

Tina Brown:
Well, exactly. I think the docs have taken over that role, the narrative role. What is a pity though, is that now the documentarians are being totally squeezed with budgets. They cut all that, alas. But yeah, I think that’s where a lot of the narrative talent went was documentaries.

Ben Smith:
I mean, I’ve heard this story a lot of times, but I remember hearing it at Harry’s memorial about you and him every morning, when you were at times in your life when you did not in fact have armies of reporters to assign, waking up and assigning stories anyway, to sort of your imaginary troops. In this bananas moment that we’re in right now, what should we be writing? Can you assign some stories? When you woke up this morning, what were you assigning in your imagination?

Tina Brown:
I’m kind of fascinated by this edict that went out to the law firms that they have to give all this money to these Trump causes. What’s that? What causes are they? I mean, they’re not by any chance the Trump Foundation, are they? I mean, what is happening with that? So that really interests me. I really want to read a big fat story, a real blowout take down of Howard Lutnick.

Max Tani:
Oh, that’s a great idea.

Tina Brown:
Now, I haven’t seen that. Who are these people? This could be completely apocryphal and perhaps I shouldn’t even say it, because I could be sued or you could be sued. Just that I had heard that (beep) landed a private plane at his son’s camp when it was Parents Visiting Day, but-

Ben Smith:
Amazing.

Tina Brown:
... that could be wrong, and I am not saying here-

Ben Smith:
Well, you heard that somebody had done that, perhaps.

Max Tani:
It’s a podcast. You can say anything on here.

Tina Brown:
No, you can’t.

Ben Smith:
No you can’t, Max.

Tina Brown:
No, you can’t. You can’t. But I did hear that. But also this guy, this guy Bukele, this president of El Salvador, who sort of sits there looking a kind of something out of Regine’s nightclub in 1998 with his-

Max Tani:
The outfit was crazy.

Tina Brown:
Crazy. I mean, I wanted to just know what aftershave he was wearing, because I just know that it permeated the Oval Office. But he suddenly appears, and he’s in the mix now. So who is he? I couldn’t find any really good pieces about who is Bukele.

Max Tani:
There’s a great story in the New Yorker about this, your alma mater.

Tina Brown:
Okay. Missed it, missed it. All right. Was it this last week?

Max Tani:
No, it was actually pre-Trump, but yes, maybe it’s due for a renewal.

Tina Brown:
Definitely. I would say to them, “Refresh and repost.”

Ben Smith:
Right. But just the question, where do these men come from?

Tina Brown:
Where do they come from?

Ben Smith:
All these new men.

Tina Brown:
All these new men. I mean, suddenly we have an entire new world order where these Gambino people. I don’t know who they are, but suddenly, they’re sitting in the office being entertained. Meanwhile, Zelenskyy, the war hero is being kicked to the curb and shown the door. So I think there are so many good profiles to be done. I think that if you had a newspaper, you’d really want to have twice a week, just a huge page of how the British newspapers used to do man of the week or something. And you want that sort of great piece about Lutnick and Bukele and this guy Navarro, who’s like...
So you’re getting it in bits. You get it in bits, and some people are doing it. I mean, I can’t read everything. I’m sure people are sitting there sneering and thinking, “Oh my God, she didn’t see that huge beast,” in wherever, Puck, that last week that did exactly that. But that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? It’s that a lot of it doesn’t land, because you can’t find it.

Ben Smith:
Well, and also it is, I wish I could send somebody out to report for three months, but that’s not in our model. It’s not in the economics of a lot of news these days just to dispatch Max down a rabbit hole for three months without writing anything or even being sure he’ll bring anything back. But it’s right. I’m just thinking about these people you talk about. If you look back to the ’90s, Peter Navarro was a failed four-time Democratic candidate for office in San Diego. Bukele was, I suppose, working at his family’s Yamaha dealership, so motorcycles in San Salvador. These were such sort of marginal people who made their way to the center.

Tina Brown:
Well, I think the rise of the randos is the series, what you really want.

Ben Smith:
Now, we’re talking now.

Tina Brown:
Because, I mean, one of the things that I liked in Michael Wolff’s new book, I sometimes don’t like his books, but I did actually like the new book, because I loved learning about Natalie Harp who runs behind the golf cart with the printer for Trump. I mean, it’s like how, why? And indeed, Karoline Leavitt, it’s like she’s just sort of exploded into our lives and there she is. You’ve got to hand it to her. She is pretty self-confident, age 27, to be able to face the press as she does. But where does this self-confidence come from? It’s really amazing to see. So I’m fascinated by all these people. Absolutely fascinated. They’re a carnival of copy.

Ben Smith:
And Michael’s book totally embodies that, because the two main characters are not Trump, who’s mostly offstage. It’s Boris Epshteyn, this sort of-

Tina Brown:
I know.

Ben Smith:
... big overbearing lawyer and then Natalie. Yes, you could sort of produce it as sort of some type of comic opera or something. It is-

Tina Brown:
It’s a comic opera. And is Boris still out there hanging out? I mean, is he there?

Ben Smith:
Boris is doing great. Yeah. He’s thriving.

Tina Brown:
I mean, you saw it a bit in that last press conference when you saw that horrendous circle of Pam Bondi and Stephen Miller who were all in the Bukele conference. I mean, it’s such a kind of fascinating cast of clowns, essentially. But they’re very powerful.

Ben Smith:
And it’s definitely people who were genuinely kind of marginalized. Miller was marginalized and mocked, and I think resented that. These are great stories.

Tina Brown:
Yeah, they are, they are.

Max Tani:
Well, you know what? If nobody else will do them we’ll look forward to reading your takes about them and your excellent writing. The Substack is so vivid and fun and just had a great time reading it.

Tina Brown:
Oh, thank you. I’m so pleased. And I love Semafor. I wish I could come to your big summit next week, but I’ve actually got to go to this literary gala that I accepted doing. Otherwise, I would be there, but it’s a fantastic lineup.

Ben Smith:
Well, hope listeners will join us down at the World Economy Summit in Washington. Thank you for the plug.

Max Tani:
Oh, we got a nice little plug in there. That’s great.

Tina Brown:
Yes, indeed.

Max Tani:
Well, thank you so much for joining us.

Ben Smith:
Thank you, Tina.

Tina Brown:
All right, thanks.

Max Tani:
That was such a fun conversation. Obviously, Tina, one of the great media personalities. What did you think of what she had to say about the transition from this kind of very centralized top-down information magazine ecosystem to the kind of anything goes scrapping it with the rest of us Substack-driven media world that we’re in now?

Ben Smith:
I mean, the thing about her, as you know, this is sort of how I’m wired, too, she just cares about stories. I mean, I do think that in this world of, as she said, this sort of corporate gobbledygook about content, obviously part of the job of an editor, and I look at budgets and I worry about that kind of stuff, but ultimately, are you assigning good stories? Are these stories going to pop? And is this something interesting? Is this a question that you’re trying to answer? And I think she has that more than anyone else I’ve ever met. That conversation at the end where by the end of it, she’s just totally nailed this new group of profiles that we’re going to assign.

Max Tani:
Totally.

Ben Smith:
But then, the question is, I do want to send somebody to Perth. Do you know how expensive it is to fly to Perth? But there is this thing of money. And when you read these memoirs now, because Grayden just sent a memoir out about... there was some writer of his who talked, Bryan Burroughs, about having made $500,000 in a year from three stories before travel and expenses.

Max Tani:
Insane.

Ben Smith:
I mean that money, but it wasn’t just being spent on lobster in the office. They were putting just enormous amounts of time, and of great writers time, into these really big, hard complex targets. And that’s missing now.

Max Tani:
Well, I think the thing that’s changed beyond the big assigned stories is this thing that we also touched on at the end, which is actually a lot of the information is out there and it’s been reported in pieces or it’s been talked about on Reddit, or somebody has tweeted it or the subjects have posted it themselves or something like that. But there is so much information and there is so much that’s being churned out both by professional media organizations, subjects themselves, and amateurs who are just kind of interested on the internet that there is less of a way of directing all of that information into one central place, which used to take the form of just the definitive piece on X person. Right?

Ben Smith:
I wonder if that’s true though. I actually think that, amid that chaos, maybe we’re being overly dissuaded by like, “Oh my God, this isn’t really a scoop.” Because-

Max Tani:
Because it’s out there.

Ben Smith:
Because Bob473 posted it on Reddit six years ago. I actually think that we are overly reactive and probably ought to do more. We ought to attempt more to synthesize and be definitive in a world where people are so overwhelmed and disoriented.

Max Tani:
I think that that’s true. But at the same time, I really do feel like there’s just amazing things being written every day. Like we’re recording this on Wednesday. There was this great piece out about Elon Musk in The Journal and his quest to have a lot of children. And it’s a fascinating piece. And obviously it’ll be something that people will cite and people are paying attention to and talking today. And yet, my parents probably aren’t seeing it. It’s probably not truly percolating out into the real world too much, but obviously it’s amazing reporting and they actually threw real bodies at it.
But it’s going to be subsumed by this other entire wave of whatever news and information is pumped out there today. And the thousands of podcast content that’s created and information created by legitimate news organizations and fun social content that people are posting. I just feel like it’s harder for news and reporting to compete when there’s just more stuff that you can consume. That’s my feeling on it though.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I do think Emma Tucker’s Journal probably is the place trying hardest to do this stuff-

Max Tani:
Totally.

Ben Smith:
... and hitting hardest with it.

Max Tani:
Totally.

Ben Smith:
And I think also not seeing the kind of returns that the Murdoch’s had hoped for in terms of subscriptions for what is just spectacular fun reporting. I think Dana Mattioli, who did that story, had two stories like that the day we’re recording it, Wednesday the 16th. But I don’t know, I found this, honestly, a little inspiring to go out and assign some bigger swings, although not about the Royals, when Tina writes about them, I’ll read it, because I’ll read anything she writes. I just lack that gene. And actually, when I was at BuzzFeed, I tried to run it as sort of a smaller Republican publication. I had a traditional-

Max Tani:
A not monarchists.

Ben Smith:
... American, anti-monarchist view.

Max Tani:
Yeah, exactly.

Ben Smith:
But it turns out that I was just overruled by the internet, which is obsessed with and loves the Royals. And I suppose maybe now we kind of in the form of the Trump family have our own Royals to obsess about.

Max Tani:
Absolutely. Well, I think that is going to be it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. Our show, as always, is produced by Sheena Ozaki, with special thanks to Max Toomey, Britta Galanis, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zirn, and Tori Kuhr. Today’s episode was mixed by Steve Bohn, and our theme music is by Billy Libby. Our public editor this week is, of course, Tina Brown. I mean, who else,

Ben Smith:
Who else? And if you like Mixed Signals, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And feel free to review us.

Max Tani:
And if you want more, you can always sign up for Semafor’s Media Newsletter out every Sunday night.