Tina Brown is leaving The Daily Beast after five years. But more importantly, she’s leaving journalism after runs with Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Talk magazine, and then the website she started to compete with the Huffington Post. Brown says she’s taking her conference, called Women in the World, and starting Tina Brown Media Live.
Essentially, she’s becoming an organizer of seminars, lunches and dinners, and conferences. She hosted one such conference last night in Toronto with Harvey Weinstein, her former partner in Talk, for bankers, actors, and who ever was still hanging around the film festival.
Tina Brown Media Live could be very successful. But Brown’s exit from the Daily Beast marks the second time a project post-Conde Nast hasn’t worked out for her. Talk magazine started with fireworks- for real, on Ellis Island– and ended with a whimper two years later. Brown wrote a bestseller about Princess Diana, and then convinced Barry Diller to invest $18 million in The Beast.
There was the whole debacle with Newsweek. And now the Beast has just a few employees left, still churning out the site. But without Tina Brown there’s no Daily Beast. It was her idea. It’s only a matter of time before it’s shuttered, or sold off.
Maybe Brown will write a book about Hillary Clinton. And she will certainly remain a talking head on TV. But it does seem that, with print slowly dying, it’s the end of an era.
