Author
Tina Brown
Notes from Evan Smith
"It’s seems like there’s nothing she can’t do, and it’s been that way from the beginning. Born 53 years ago in Maidenhead, England, and raised in the posh town of Little Marlow on the Thames, Tina Brown was the only daughter of a film producer and press agent. Expelled from three boarding schools for her rebellious behavior, she graduated from Oxford an aspiring playwright, but immediately went to work as a journalist—first at the Sunday Times of London and then at the Sunday Telegraph. In 1979, at age 25, she was named editor of the British Society magazine Tatler, and remained there until June 1983, when she moved to New York to become an editorial adviser to the languishing American magazine Vanity Fair. Six months later she became its editor, and immediately set about resurrecting what has been, for the last generation, an immensely important and widely read publication. In 1992, she took the reins of The New Yorker, and during a controversial six-year tenure transformed yet another languishing magazine into a must-read, bringing aboard many of the marquee-name writers who populate its pages today. From 1998 to 2002 she edited the Miramax-owned magazine Talk, which never quite found its audience, and thus ended the more than twenty-year reign of one of our industry’s biggest names. But Brown’s career hasn’t slowed. In the years since, she’s hosted a cable-TV talk show — Topic A with Tina Brown, on CNBC — and written regular columns on politics and culture for the Washington Post and the New York Sun. But by far her biggest success since leaving the glossies behind came this summer, with the publication of The Diana Chronicles, a biography of her friend Diana, the Princess of Wales. The book immediately rocketed up the best-seller list, briefly hitting the top spot as the number-one book in America, before returning to mere megahit status. One only imagines what the future holds for a woman who is, without question or qualification, the Queen of All Media.
" - Evan Smith, Texas Monthly Talks, Broadcast 11.22.07
