For some prominent writers, joining the newsletter platform Substack has become a declaration of independence from traditional news organizations, or an ambitious attempt to build a new model for publishing.
For Tina Brown, a Brit who became synonymous with Manhattan media in the 1980s and ’90s, it is something less grandiose. It is simply a chance to have fun.
“This is just an extra something I’ll be doing on a Monday afternoon,” she said in an interview last week.
Her newsletter, Fresh Hell, is set to debut on Tuesday. In an introductory note to readers, she said the title referred to the experience of waking “every day to a news alert from Hades.” The newsletter, she said, would be written mostly in weekly “notebook form,” rather than “Big Think columns.”
“Writing in that private voice is what I’m interested in doing now,” Ms. Brown, 70, said in the interview, held in her apartment in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan.
She hopes the diary approach will also help in “limbering up” her voice for a planned memoir, she said. A subscription will cost $6 per month or $50 per year.
Ms. Brown may not be trying to reinvent media, unlike several of her newsletter cohorts. But her decision to join Substack is a coup for the company, which considers prestigious names to be magnets for more readers and writers. In recent weeks, Van Jones, a CNN commentator, and Jane Pratt, another influential magazine editor, have also joined the platform.
The company pursued Ms. Brown for at least a year. “I was a terrible tease,” she said. (Substack did not offer her any payment for signing up, as it did for other writers years ago.)
Hamish McKenzie, a founder of Substack, called it an “honor” to have Ms. Brown, “a real writer’s writer,” on the platform. As for her diary-like approach, he said: “That work not only has a place on Substack, but we think it can succeed wildly here.”
Though best known for editing print magazines, Ms. Brown is not new to online news. She founded The Daily Beast in 2008 and already follows about a dozen writers on Substack, including Touré, Andrew Sullivan, Joe Klein and The Free Press’s Niall Ferguson — all of whom have written for her at one point or another.
Ms. Brown, ever the editor, also plans to suggest fantasy story assignments in Fresh Hell, “and see whether anybody wants to take my advice,” she said.
Which figures would she choose to profile in a magazine today? Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, and Sean Combs, the music mogul facing sex trafficking charges, she said.
Several days before her newsletter’s debut, Ms. Brown still didn’t know what her first dispatch would tackle. Perhaps she would write about “The Apprentice,” she said, a new film about the rise of former President Donald J. Trump under his mentor Roy Cohn.
Mr. Trump makes cameos in her 2017 book “The Vanity Fair Diaries,” which chronicles her life from 1983 to 1992 — a glamorous media world long past, with its town cars and long lunches at the Four Seasons. In one entry, she mentions Mr. Trump pouring a glass of wine down the back of Marie Brenner, a writer for the magazine. (In 1990, Ms. Brenner had questioned Mr. Trump about a claim that he owned a book of Hitler speeches.)
Would Ms. Brown ever write about media gossip, like Olivia Nuzzi’s continued employment by New York Magazine after the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. scandal? “It would be silly to drop her,” she said. Or who should succeed David Remnick, The New Yorker editor who followed Ms. Brown in 1998? “I don’t want to wade in there,” she said, “largely because I just hope David does another five years.” And what happens when Anna Wintour leaves Vogue? “That’ll never happen,” she said. (When reminded that Ms. Wintour is not immortal, Ms. Brown smiled devilishly and replied, “Yes, she is.”)
The walls and shelves of Ms. Brown’s apartment are like shrines to what she called the “golden era” of glossies. There is a sketch Karl Lagerfeld drew of Ms. Brown as Eustace Tilley when she joined The New Yorker. There is a framed photograph of Ms. Brown and her family taken by Annie Leibovitz. There is a signed note of thanks from Henry Kissinger to her late husband, Harry Evans, for his “editorial wisdom.”
There is also a framed first issue of Talk magazine, which was funded by Hearst Magazines and Miramax Films, the studio founded by the Weinstein brothers. The publication folded in 2002 after about three years in print.
Though Talk ended Ms. Brown’s streak of successful magazine stewardship, she still considers its debut to be the best single issue she ever produced. The cover was a photo collage of Gwyneth Paltrow, Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush.
“You could read it today and it feels fresh as a daisy,” said Ms. Brown, who wrote a column in the issue titled “TB Notebook.” “I had two political correspondents. They were called Tucker Carlson and Jake Tapper.”
All of the magazines she edited are now leather-bound, their volumes stuffed into her bookshelves. If a fire broke out in the well-appointed apartment, which tome would Ms. Brown save first?
She did not hesitate. “My diaries,” she said.
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