Tina Brown: A $250Million Down The Drain-- And She Still Thinks She's A Success --Talk about failing up!

By Toby Young, Mar. 27, 2014, Telegraph.co.uk

In my latest Spectator column I discuss the extraordinary career of Tina Brown. Tina is often described as the most successful British journalist of her generation and, on the face of it, that's true. She became the editor of Tatler at the age of 25, editor of Vanity Fair when she was 29 and the New Yorker at 38. She then went on to set up and edit Talk magazine, enjoyed a brief career as a chat show host on CNBC and, finally, set up and edited the Daily Beast. She's also the author of a best-selling book about the late Princess of Wales.

But what makes her career "extraordinary" isn't just the fact that it was so meteoric, but that she managed to go from one job to another while the magazines she edited – particularly the ones she set up herself – lost money. And I don't just mean a bit of money. As I say in the Spectator, "I would conservatively estimate she’s lost her backers a quarter of a billion dollars."

How did I arrive at this colossal sum?

When it comes to the first three magazines she edited – Tatler, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker – it's impossible to say with certainty how much money they lost under her stewardship since they're privately owned by the Newhouse family and the companies that publish them have never issued public accounts.

So let's exclude Tatler and Vanity Fair for the time being. We'll come back to them.

According to this article for the New York Times, the New Yorker lost $30 million in 1993, the first full year Tina was in charge, $17 million in 1995, $14 million in 1996 and $11 million in 1998. It doesn't record the losses for 1994 and 1997, but if you factor in that it lost an average of $18 million a year in 1993, 1994, 1996 and 1998, and assume that it lost that amount in 1994 and 1997, the estimated total losses during Tina's reign were $108 million.

Next, let's look at Talk, the magazine Tina launched with great fanfare in 1999. According to this article in the New York Times, by the time it folded in 2002 it had lost its backers (Hearst Magazines and Miramax) $27 million a year each. So that's a total of $54 million over the course of its (roughly) two year life. And that's a conservative estimate. This article in the New York Post puts the figure at $80 million, but I'm going to go with the more modest of the two.

Finally, there's The Daily Beast, which Tina founded in 2008. According to this article by Michael Wolff in the current issue of GQ, the Daily Beast lost a total of $100 million during Brown's five year reign.

If we add up those losses, we get a grand total of $264 million.

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