This Media Life

The Talk of Hearst

Within the Newhouse organization, Tina Brown achieved most-favored status because she pleased Si Newhouse, a remote mandarin who seemed to live vicariously through her dominance of the New York media world. The comparable figure at Hearst is Frank Bennack, the CEO and 43-year veteran of the company. But where Newhouse presides over something akin to the court of Louis XIV, Bennack runs an enterprise closer to the feel of U.S. Steel. "He pays the bills," observes a magazine hand, with something like praise. "He loves his numbers," muses a Hearst publisher. Bennack, from Texas and the radio and newspaper businesses, is variously described as someone who will get Tina and as someone who won't get Tina at all (he is said to have gotten Harper's Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis, pleased that she could produce buzz without Anna Wintour's cost). What that means, I think, is that if Tina Brown can return good numbers (say, a 70 percent sell-through at the newsstand), he will get Tina; if she can't, he won't.

But it is Cathie Black, the 55-year-old president of Hearst Magazines, who is probably Tina Brown's most important ally or most serious potential antagonist (one camp says that Black wanted the Talk deal; another says she was bitterly opposed).

In the seventies, ten years before Brown got the title, Black, cutting a striking figure with her pre?Ralph Lauren preppy look, was what the (male) head of a major magazine company called the "media chick" of the moment (the magazine business was just beginning its transition from a male world to a female one). She was at Holiday magazine in its heyday, then Travel & Leisure, then Ms. in its important years, moving in Francis Ford Coppola's entourage during the seventies, then becoming New York's publisher, then publisher of USA Today in the eighties and president of the Newspaper Association of America in the nineties.

So far in her three years running Hearst Magazines, Black has eased out Ed Kosner at Esquire and hired David Granger, but Esquire's circulation continues to plummet; she's finessed the retirement of Helen Gurley Brown at Cosmo and slid Marie Claire's star editor Bonnie Fuller into the position, only to have her quickly poached by Condé Nast and then to be rebuffed by Newhouse lawyers in an attempt to hire her back. Black, in turn, has raided Condé Nast, where she nabbed former GQ publisher Michael Clinton. But it's only now, with the launch of CosmoGIRL!, the new Oprah title Hearst recently announced, and most notably Talk, that Black gets to have a serious impact on Hearst. In that regard, Tina Brown is the opportunity of a lifetime or some major, major pain in the ass.

It is all a question of emphasis, or return on investment. And something to do with branding, someone undoubtedly has argued at Hearst.

In other words, Si Newhouse has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to create Tina Brown; during the past year, Disney and Miramax have spent numbers of millions more. Now the Hearst Corporation can get the benefit of that investment for relatively little. Instead of being known as the company that killed Esquire (applying its bottom-line formula, as Esquire circulation profits failed to measure up to Hearst standards, it cut Esquire's page count until it looked like a giveaway magazine next to its fat competitors Vanity Fair and GQ), it will now be known as the company that publishes Tina Brown. And Tina Brown, as they might say in Selling for Dummies, is an opener. (Oprah is a pretty impressive opener, too.)

The job for Tina, of course, is to get her magazine to turn a profit -- or to become "viable" -- before Hearst decides that it has gotten the value it's going to get out of her. Similarly, when Hachette launched JFK Jr.'s George, the calculation must have been that Hachette was willing to lose $20 million or $30 million or $40 million on the greatest opener of all time rather than on the specific potential of a consumer magazine devoted to politics. Indeed, during the past few months, it seemed that Hachette was trying to decide how much more the greatest opener of all time might be worth, or whether JFK Jr. had opened all the doors he was going to open for them.

Shortly after the announcement of the Talk deal, Cathie Black threw a dinner party at her Park Avenue apartment for Tina and her friends -- Peter Jennings, Charlie Rose, Steve Rattner, Michael Bloomberg, and Geraldine Laybourne among them. Some of Tina's crowd complained that the party was a dud. "Goofy, not so fabulous, the country mouse comes to the city. And dinner was served way too late," says a Tina-minded editor. But that surely misses the point, which is not, first and foremost, to go all-out to make Tina look good but, for as little as possible, to let Hearst rub elbows with Tina's set and make it look a little better.

In the end, if Tina does well, Hearst will own a meaningful piece of Talk; if she doesn't do well, it will be her downfall and, all in all, for Hearst, not that costly a stumble. That's how Hearst must see it, anyway.

But Tina, of course, is not without power and resources of her own (not to mention Harvey Weinstein's particular talents). Being an entrepreneur -- the unlikely position in which she finds herself -- is a new sort of geopolitical spheres-of-influence game. You have to align with a superpower, which will, reliably, act only in its own interests. Still, Tina has always managed to spend enormous sums of other people's money that they no doubt did not originally plan to spend. She is able to accomplish this trick in part because people and companies get a little crazy when the light (even the reflected light) falls on them and, of course, because she always manages to make herself the drop-dead center of attention. Indeed, this column, I notice, is not about Hearst but about Tina once again.

E-mail: michael@burnrate.com