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Talk magazine
Lots of things but timing certainly played a role
When it launched in the sleepy summer of 1999, Talk was a dream of a magazine, meant to be bigger and grander than anything before it, and Tina Brown seemed the right person to do it, as disliked as she was by some, having revived Vanity Fair and then woken up The New Yorker from a sleep of many years.
When the dream shattered last Friday, the consensus among an ever-expanding army of Tina ill-wishers was that Talk was doomed from the beginning.
Were it so simple. Were it as easy as the notion that Talk was a bad idea that only got worse.
In fact, Talk was a good idea that got better over time. It just ran out of time.
Talk was not a perfect magazine in any sense, but it was a lot better magazine than the stories of its imminent death would have you believe.
What did Talk in were a number of things.
Tops among them was that Talk was too bold an idea in an industry that is surprisingly uncomfortable with much of anything that's bold, beyond the soap of that name. Bold ideas are great to talk about; they are a lot harder to sell. They can confuse people and cause involuntary lip-biting.
Mixed in with all the early talk of Talk was the idea that as a general interest magazine it would be returning to and reviving some of the feeling of magazines such as Look and Life in their great years. It would be a magazine not only about but in touch with America.
Indeed, those magazines were about and in touch with their America, but that came over years, and that was a very different time, really before television.
It would have taken Brown years to achieve that vision, and she didn't have them. She hadn't the time to build a big magazine, only a small one.
In her own way, she did that well, but it went largely unnoticed against the expectations. More and more readers noticed it, and circulation grew. Media buyers noticed it, and they placed more advertising, though certainly not enough.
But it went unnoticed by the people Brown needed, the critics and trend-setters, the chatterers. They had gone on to other things.
Another factor in Talk's death was the Miramax connection, the deal that would have the magazine generate stories for movies. In the process, Talk was perceived as a shill for Miramax and its films. Right or wrong, it didn't make any difference. The effect was a killer.
With rare exceptions, magazines that don't stand on their own two feet as editorial ventures are never taken seriously by either readers or advertisers.
Another killer was the endless talk over Talk and Tina and Ron and all of their problems. It's the kind of buzz that comes as a great blessing when a magazine is perceived as a good read. The buzz over the magazine and the buzz over the people behind the magazine conspire to create even deeper buzz that spills out to ever-widening audiences.
But with Talk the buzz worked against it. It didn't bring people to the magazine; it distracted potential readers. It obscured the fact that over the years Talk changed and grew and became a better small magazine.
In the magazine business there are second acts and third acts and fourth acts. The hope is that people are still in the audience to watch them. For Talk, too many had left after the first.
Another killer factor was that while Talk was envisioned as a grander, more general-interest magazine--again think Look and Life of yore and all the coffee tables they landed on each week--there was an insider tone to Talk of the sort that turns off most right-thinking Americans.
Talk was too socially ambitious for this America.
Brown committed an editor's worst mistake--thinking that because you find New York society fascinating everyone else will as well. It was similar to the mistake Inside.com made in its belief that folks in Middle America would be just dying to learn what was really going on behind the closed doors of Miramax.
Inside's editors were, Americans were not.
In some ways Brown cannot be faulted. This insiderish form of journalism has become so much a staple of New York writing that it often goes unnoticed.
But it has never really been accepted outside of New York.
This is not to say social climbing is not pursued as vigorously elsewhere in the country, almost as a contact sport. It is not done so publicly and with nearly so much gush. It is not supposed to be noticed.
January 22, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
