YouSaid · the spoken record

Tina Brown

lines on the record: 153
first: 2017-11-20
most recent: 2017-11-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, I had not heard those rumors. No. I mean, I assumed that he was someone who was girls galore, you know, but I never saw it actually.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wasn't. You know, I mean, ultimately, I didn't hang with Harvey. I really didn't. And it was after hours, it was in his office. I never hung with Harvey.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, 20 minutes in, I hated it. But, you know, I had an amazing team there. I mean, I had my Rashan, who's absolutely fantastic. I had Jonathan Mahler, who went to the New York Times, and Daniel Matuna went to the New York Times, and Sam Sifton, who became the New York Times. It was everybody at the New York Times, actually, after we folded it. So they were an immensely good team. And it was a great magazine, I think, but the battle about what it should be began to afflict the pages. I mean, you could see that it lost focus. Harvey won. I mean, he said you have to make it glossy and you have to make it. And I never liked the way it looked after that. I liked the way it looked when it came out.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He would berate you me, you know, and he would continually bully and shout and want what he wanted and humiliate and denigrate. And it's hard, hard, very hard to keep your focus when you're working in that kind of situation. And, you know, I began to kind of lose my sense of 20 minutes.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After that, you know, we had to kind of keep following up, and I had spent probably way too much of my story capital on the first issue. But mostly Harvey hated the way it looked and he wanted me to turn it into Vanity Fair. So we had these battles which really kind of destabilized me as an editor. Because I wasn't used to having somebody interfere. I just wasn't, I didn't handle that. And he was able to do that.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In their early days. We had a great little picture of, I think it was It was a murder, I know that, typical of me, but it was. Oh, I know what it was. It was the...”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had George Bush candidate, George W. Bush, by Tucker Carlson, who was our political writer. Our political writers were Jake Tapper and Tucker Carlson. Wow.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was an amazing issue. It's still an amazing issue. Sure, I have it. The Hillary Clinton and we had the first interview ever given before or since about Monica Lewinsky.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I thought I had, but he obviously wasn't listening. You know, the fact is people don't listen when they want something. Right, right. So the first issue came out and was absolutely huge success. I mean, it was the reverse of...”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so Harvey did not like that idea. I mean, it turns out it was a classic thing I was once told by the director Sam Spiegel. He said, you have to make sure you're all making the same movie, right? Right. Everybody goes blithely on their way. Everybody has a different vision in their mind. It turns out Harvey thought wanted me to do another vanity fair. And he really wanted me to do another vanity fair. I then realized as I got into it, to grow his own power base, to assign stories that would then keep him from writing about him and to basically have a media power base which enabled him to wield power over genuine more. Which we know now why he was so keen to wield power over journalists. So that was really the clash right from the beginning is that he won't.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I love that idea. Nobody was doing that, actually. And I liked having it not perfect bound, but with a staple through it. I had a very strong feeling of what it should be, and I wanted it to be somewhat oversized, like Parry Match was. And there was a Dutch magazine called Twin in the 60s, actually, that was my model, which is one of my obsessions. So I had this, the whole concept was to do that. I did not want to do Infanity Fair again, otherwise why would I have left? And I didn't want to do the New Yorker again, otherwise why would I have? I had this other idea.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I saw it now I now wanted to do what I thought it was a I was obsessed as I do get obsessed with European news magazines right I love magazines like Parry Match okay Stern in Germany I love those magazines slightly thinner paper and covers with multiple images on them right so you'll have four images you won't have a big fat celebrity face you'll have a picture of you know as it were Mark Zuckerberg and a picture of Ashley Jard and a picture you know you'd have the zeitgeist on the cover”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love Talk magazine. And, you know, one of the things that's very funny to me on this book tour, even is that there are certain people, there's always like one woman in four, one person in four comes up and says with a copy of Talk magazine and says, You know, I want to tell you that I love Talk magazine and I want to throw my arms around them and say, you know, join my lifeboat.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had no regrets, except Yes, it did. It certainly did. So, we'll get to Harvey Weinstein in a second, but what were you trying to do with Tucker? I mean, because talk was the first multimedia, you know, Martha Stewart was doing it. I love it.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know. So it was like that, and we had all these Chinese lanterns hanging, and we had Macy Gay who just hadn't really been discovered yet, being the band and George Plimpton doing the fireworks. It was absolutely amazing. I had no regrets, except when it set me up for the most devastating collapse. Yes, it did. It certainly did.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The whole thing went completely into the stratosphere. It was like the additional effect to what I usually do amped up by 30,000 by having Harvey as a partner. And, you know, so we took over the Statue of Liberty and we had these barges arriving. I called it the ship of fools. It was like every celebrity. It was an arc. It was like a Noah's Ark of celebrity culture. In they came two by two. Madonna and Demi Moore and Salman Rushdie and Henry Kissinger was completely mad. And he”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listen, that was the best party of life in 20th century. It was. It was so crazy. It was crazy. It was such a crazy party. Yeah, we had this party at the Statue of Liberty where...”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, you know, and unless you're going to expand it out, I mean, Remnik's been there longer, but he's doing all these other wonderful things, which is the things that I wanted suggested doing a long time ago, although, of course, there were no podcasts in those days. But, you know, so I left to go with Harvey, and of course, you know, immediately within 20 minutes, I realized that was just a giant mistake.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Plates because you sort of, I mean, in that way you did see the writing on the wall that things were changing in terms of... You do write about it in the book. I'll find it in a second. But you were in the top job in magazine journalism, really, pretty much at the New Yorker. Really, pretty much”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, as it turns out, but you know, what I saw was the English patient was Shakespeare in love or was my left foot was my beautiful. Everything I ever liked he seemed to have done. And he said, you know, what you should be doing as a magazine that's also a book company, a movie company. So I thought, wait a minute, this guy's speaking my language. He knows he's a rough diamond. Okay, it's not going to be easy, but I need that shaking up. I've been 18 years in the French court of Louis XIV. Right.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Making movies, and I had tried to persuade him to do that at Vanity Fair. In fact, I tried at the end of the 90s, there's an entry where I talk about bringing in this terrific TV producer from ABC, Susan Mercander, and she had pitched doing a Vanity Fair show. And I never wanted to know. It was one of his most irritating traits, I have to say, was he would start to shake his head from side to side before you'd finish the sentence. So I used to learn to put everything in writing because it made me crazy when I'd say So what I'd like to do is a TV show and he'd start like nodding no and I wanted to let the shake him and say listen you know yes yes but he didn't and so I left the New Yorker because you know along comes Harvey Weinstein”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very metaphorical. So, I mean, yeah, that stuff was happening, but it wasn't really what I did want to do, though, and the reason it really was the reason I left the New Yorker, was I wanted the New Yorker to be more than a magazine. And being wrestlers. You're a brad. You were a brown. Yeah, I did. I went to Sci and I said to him,”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was like a black site. It was like some CIA rendition issues. You know, they just, I mean, it was union. It was because of union. To work on the digital stuff was to be sort of relegated, to be the person who'd been kicked out of the new room where it's very metaphor.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is, but they wasn't so much it was that off stage thing that was happening where people were relegated to another room to do that. You know, it was like all of these newspapers starting internet arms and they would do things like I think the Washington Post put everybody across the river in some other place.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought how exciting it was just to be able to work with writers on their stories and not have to keep wondering about when Madonna's was available to her Ritzy's photo shoot. You know, I got into the celebrity wrangling. Yeah, exactly. I was tired of celebrity wrangling. I was a bit tired of the celebrity stuff in general. And I thought I wanted to raise my game again. And I did, I think. When I went in, I thought I'm tired of these big long pieces in The New Yorker. I'm going to cut them all back. And I did a whole issue, a 50,000 word piece I did on math.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the main thing. Yeah, yeah. Vanity Fair was a big top. It was a big circus. It was colorful. It was jazzy. It was weird. And the New Yorker was the sleeping beauty. It was a tower, really, an academic tower in a sense. And I love being able to go back to my own literary roots because when I began journalism before Tatler, I was writing for the new statesman, which was really like a kind of, you know, it was a literary weekly like the New Republic in a sense.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And sort of did a sort of retro facelift where I took it back to a sort of sparked up version of the How Ross magazine. And as a result, it looked exactly right, I think, as it came out, which was wonderful. So it had a very good reception straight away.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I wanted to bring back some of that, and also it had a variety of lengths. You know, the talk of the town was actually little snippets, really, that were like 250 word pieces incredibly. I never quite managed to get them back down to 250 words. I did want it. And I took a lot of the rubrics in the magazine like shouts and murmurs and annals of personal history and all of that. Yeah, annals of China. And I would bring all those back into the magazine.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I felt, no, let's go back to the Harold Ross New Yorker because Harold Ross had full page cartoons, which people don't realize. I mean, you know, Peter Arno and Charles Adams, you know, who were the sort of real hot social, you know, buzzing people of the day, did these great full-page drawings, covers that were far more kind of racy? I mean, some of those Charles Adams, those Peterano covers, were just so racy, you know?”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A word church, if you like. A word church is a great covers of sort of park benches covered in leaves, you know, very decorous, very timid. I mean,”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Annie Lieberwitz and Helmut Newton and Herbert and all those wonderful photographers. And we redesigned it. The New Yorker, I realized it had to be redesigned immediately and very carefully, so I actually went back and studied the New Yorker of the twenties and 30s, which had been edited by Harold Ross, and people don't think about the New Yorker in those terms at all. They think of William Shawn's New Yorker because he was there for forty years subsequently.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the New Yorker I wanted to wake up the sleeping beauty. I mean, to me, I was very, very clear what I wanted to do with the New Yorker. I felt that it was a literary jewel that had become overgrown with ivy, and And a sense of its own importance. And it had no visual appeal at all. One of my first things I did, as I did at The New Yorker, and I think, you know, people underestimate the visual sense in New York. You know, a visual sense is very important if you're going to edit magazines with...”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to tap dance faster. You have to earn more awards, work 13 times harder to get half the amount of sort of pats on the back. That's just true of so many women that I know, and it was probably true of me.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's so brilliant. And he's so versatile too. I mean, he was always the big star when I was there. And one of the things that was wonderful about Remnik is he was always the one who said yes. You know, there's always that moment when everyone's exhausted. You're going home. Huge news break. Oh my God, we're going to press. Somebody's got to write a new comment at the front of the magazine. And he would always be the person who'd say, I will do it. And he would sit down and write something fantastic. And so I love him forever, indeed, and a day. But, you know, no, I think women on the whole tend to get, they have to, you know, I've said before that, you know, women have to be gold for a silver job. You sort of feel...”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know you've rubbed people the wrong way. Well, Remnick himself actually has been very generous. Of course, he really has. I mean, he's always given me the sort of very generous credit for having created the magazine that he now edits, which he's done a brilliant job with.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, they were a wonderful child. Do you think you get credit for that? Because one of the things that has been through your career is, I find it unfair. I know you're tough. I get that and I know you've rubbed people the wrong way. But it's really interesting how people talk about you versus a remnik, for example.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I changed it completely. And I think the New Yorker was probably one of the happiest seven years of my life. I mean, it was the stakes were so high. I mean, that felt like mission impossible at the beginning. But we did absolutely turn it around. Update it. We updated it and completely updated it. And, you know, I let go 50 people. I brought in another 50. And of the 50 I brought in, I brought in, you know, David Remnick, who I had from the Washington Post, Malton Gladwell.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What you know, Michael Jackson reading New Yorker short stories, it seems so extraordinarily off brand, if you like. But who do we know who is? I mean, the fact is that he did have another secret life, and it was completely different from the one that everybody wrote about.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I found sort of shy and sort of otherworldly almost and told me that he after his big concerts he would go back to his hotel and read the short stories of OHARA and O'Henry. It's like”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, it's fun. I mean, they argued over time. One of the things I think that's fun always is to see sort of very iconic people up close and realize they're so different on the whole to their massive imagery. Somebody like, I mean, Warren Beatty was so kind of different in a way for the Hearthfrog image. I mean, he's kind of bookish and vague and absent-minded and rumpled and all the things that you wouldn't think that Warren Batty would be. Michael Jackson, on the other hand, who had such a sort of freakish image.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dinner party was too big enough of them utterly ridiculous that they were doing that. You're like, oh, really? That's who they were. In an odd way, I deal with a lot of the internet moguls who someday will be iconic. I knew when they were sort of like petty and small and jerks. Yeah, I know all this fine.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, just yeah, well, I mean, and they sort of circled each other like these big cats. No dinner party was too big enough for them.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I like him having Philip brought there and him and not wanting to be. That's one thing that I really like about this book because you think about these people as icons and then they're just regular people who have problems at dinner parties, you know, just yeah, well, I mean,”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think we built on the legacy of some great American magazines. I mean, in between Vanity Fair of the 30s, you'd had Clay Felker's New York magazine, which was Clay Felker, Incredible Magazine, you had Jan Wenner's Rolling Stone, which was another incredible magazine. You had Harold Hayes' Esquire. So we had some great magazines. And I did draw from those. I felt that Clay Felke was one of the very best at putting his finger on the how we live now story. And I wanted that genre as well. I thought that Harold Hayes Esquire did some wonderful personal essays. Sure did. And I wanted those voices.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm a very curious person. I do have a wide range of interest. I'm interested in politics, culture, celebrity culture, crime. I mean, this is my juice. And I followed my nose for the stories that really excited me.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just a general interest magazine My aim was to be at the front of what everybody was talking about that month. I mean, that was really what drove the magazine. By that I really mean satisfying my personal curiosity. I mean, it wasn't as if I was thinking, what are everybody else going to be talking about? It just interested me. So I think most magazines of any worth when they first launch and created DNA, they often then have subsequent editors who sort of follow that DNA in a different fashion. But I think founding editors, it's about satisfying their curiosity and sense of what you're interested in. What is interested in?”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was trying to make them understand. It had elements. It's the Uber of. Mirthlessly Which is essentially a general interest. It's a general interest magnet. So you spent a lot of time doing what you were doing that, but what were you going for, this idea of high-low, or what was your aim?”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I Yeah, I mean, I kept sitting in these meetings and they say, Well, is it a fashion magazine? Is it a political magazine? Is it a culture magazine or is it a this magazine? And I thought it's all of those things. You know, I remember I had some little pitch which sounds so ridiculous now saying it's a cross between the New Yorker and W and the Connoisseur magazine. I was trying to make them understand. It had elements. It's the Uber of. It's the Uber of, exactly. So I did a lot of that. And after a time, everybody said, oh, well, there was a gap in the market. which makes me laugh mirthlessly because I realized how damn hard it was to create the market for it actually.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the British newspapers actually do that high-low thing at their best very well. I mean, they also do cheesy, horrible things. But at their best, they do sort of mingle the sort of the gravitas with the irreverence. And they put it all together with a very sort of... raised eyebrow kind of skeptical tone, which I've always liked very much. And I very much wanted to have something that was The sort of front edge of the culture, but on many fronts. You know, one of the things that happened when I launched Vanity Fair was that people for the first couple of years when we couldn't make advertisers come in, the major problem was they couldn't understand really what it was.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I wanted to do, what I wanted to bring was that sort of high low European approach to journalism, as it were, into America, because”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT