Many people in the magazine business have their Tina stories. Here's mine. At some point in the Tina Brown era at The New Yorker, I got a call from her asking me to write a piece about "religion." After routine flattery, she got to the point. "We have a fabulous issue coming up on religion, and Dick Avedon is photographing several religious figures and icons, and I wondered whether you could do an accompanying essay," she asked in her clipped, breathless tone. "About what?" I asked. "Religion is a pretty big topic." "Oh, that would be up to you," Ms. Brown replied. "Anything that's hot right now in religion. Anything hot." In all the commentary on the demise of Ms. Brown's recent venture, Talk magazine, there has been much discussion of its economics, lack of buzz, the ad collapse after Sept. 11, and so on. A surprising omission is any reflection on the guiding philosophy of Tina Brown. It was what supercharged her Vanity Fair in the 1980s; it helped rescue The New Yorker (at least in terms of readability) in the 1990s; and it certainly helped doom Talk in the new millennium. it was the crazed cult of contemporaneity, the insistent, relentless outer-directedness of an editor who saw what was hot as always and everywhere preferable to what is true, who believed that an article was nothing unless it had been spun and hyped, who, despite obvious razor intelligence, raw talent and prodigious industry, never seemed to have a view of her own, a politics, a guiding principle, a cause. When a grown-up editor can actually ask a writer about what's "hot" in the questions of eternal life, the fate of the soul, and the meaning of existence, you have to wonder if, deep inside her, that's all she actually sees.
 And that empty center was the quintessential vision of her magazine. I say "magazine" in the singular because she only ever really produced one. The formulas at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and Talk were variations on a theme. The core was the cult of celebrity--any celebrity--to sell magazines. From hiring Roseanne to oversee a special issue of The New Yorker to publishing Chelsea Clinton's banal musings about Sept. 11 in Talk, the principle was exactly the same. Above all, celebrities of any kind were never criticized. Whether it was fawning profiles of Hollywood starlets at Vanity Fair or deferential treatment of the latest "hot" media mogul in The New Yorker, Ms. Brown was fanatical about political safety. When Bill Clinton became president, her first instinct was to hire Sidney Blumenthal, the most pro-Clinton writer on the planet, and one of his first tasks was to wangle her an invite to the inauguration. That's why her magazines tilted, insofar as they tilted anywhere, to the left--not because Ms. Brown is or was a liberal (her politics, if she has any, remain a complete mystery), but because the people in Hollywood and Manhattan upon whom she relied for money and contacts and favors were all liberals. I was trying to think recently of any article that Tina Brown published that was brave, that took on a powerful individual who could actually do her harm. I came up with nothing.
The formula, however, worked. With seemingly endless resources to buy up the best writers in America, she produced some great journalism that no one should ever take away from her. But the price for the culture was extremely steep. Her mindset came direct from a British elite that, by the 1980s, had stopped believing in anything much, an elite worldview that, in place of God, relied on the demigods of fashion, hipness, irony, design and gossip. Ms. Brown's genius was to realize that this formula would work better in America because it had the grist of a traditionally sincere, more earnest culture to work off. Her irreverence and her sense of fun were tonics. But they brought with them an empty center that the pyrotechnics of hype and spin and parties and public relations could only partly obscure. The clearest symbol of this, for me, was her abolition at The New Yorker of the unsigned editorials in "Talk of the Town." By removing them, she was essentially saying that there was no inner core that was The New Yorker anymore, or that she didn't have the conviction to provide it. There were merely writers orbiting like satellites around her hyperactive sun. The substantive center of the magazine, its very editorial voice, ceded to a chatter of hot young and not-so-young things. In this, she was surely the woman for her time--acutely in sync with the delirious daydream of the 1990s and the media vanities it fostered and to which many of us fell victim. She was the Bill Clinton of the magazine trade, riding the news cycles and elite chatter and celebrity boomlets with even more skill and panache than her cultural mentor in the White House. But if you asked yourself of Ms. Brown, as of Mr. Clinton, what exactly did she stand for, what precisely would she fight for, what, beneath all the skill and spin and buzz, was irreducibly her, you'd end up scratching your head. In the 1990s, the key political word was spin, and the parallel media word was buzz. Mr. Clinton was the master of one; Ms. Brown was the mistress of the other. Between the two of them, the word substance struggled for relevance.
And that's why, in the end, Talk failed. It wasn't the money. Tina Brown had squandered tens of millions in her illustrious career. Like a dot-com startup, Ms. Brown disdained traditional economics, demanding small fortunes from her proprietors in return for . . . buzz. In the 1990s, the money was always there--and it was corrosive as well as productive. Her largess almost killed off other magazines. As editor of The New Republic during Ms. Brown's heyday, I watched as almost every single young writer I found was immediately offered small fortunes by Tina to decamp. She didn't so much scout for talent as read other magazines and bribe it. She operated a magazine less as a home for likeminded writers and editors than as a Hollywood studio in which big names were signed up for vast sums, and often kept idle. The point was to create the buzz of an acquisition and bask in the reflected glory. It was about appearance more than substance. The result was that many writers saw their work paid for and never published, because the magazine, like an airplane, had been overbooked, or because the story fell victim to the latest must-run piece attuned to the nanosecond of the culture. Everyone knew this, but no one could stop it. She seemed unstoppable. What did her in was the changing culture. By the turn of the millennium, you could feel a shift. The burst of the dot-com bubble, the slowing economy, the election of George W. Bush, the retreat of Hollywood from Washington, the emergence of Internet media--all these began to generate a new, more substantive mood. Tina didn't seem to see it, or, if she did, couldn't change the way she operated to accommodate it quickly enough.
There were signs in the last few issues of Talk that she was beginning to get the message. But it was too late. Her own branding had been too successful for her to be "rebranded" overnight. By the end of last year, one wanted to read Talk almost as much as one wanted to buy Enron shares. In retrospect, however, Sept. 11 was the watershed for Tinaism--not because of what it did to the economy, but because of what it did for the culture. That day reminded us that there are more important things than winning the news cycle, that the old virtues still matter, that substance counts, and that the opposite of "hot" is sometimes true. This culture is here to stay for the foreseeable future and it is one in which Tina Brown, as epitomized by Talk, has simply nothing to say. Mr. Sullivan writes for The New Republic, the New York Times Magazine and andrewsullivan.com.
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