Tina Brown is not a fan of the work-from-home era

Tina Brown is every bit an anomaly. A Brit whom even New Yorkers love; she is the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, who now confesses hasn’t picked up a magazine in a long, long time. Her innie may be one of the most coveted bylines in print, but her outie dresses the part of a news anchor with a blowout short coif, bulbous pearl earrings and tailored suit that never look out of place, even in the burning Indian summer.

Brown is also the sort of journalist who can get away with calling Prince Philip “so damn hot” and the Middleton family “somewhat like the Kardashians”, as she did in her last outing in India, attending the latest edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival to promote her 2022 book, The Palace Papers. 

These days, she reserves her acerbic wit and wise commentary for a new medium, her Substack (or, as she puts it, “the third trimester of my life”) called Fresh Hell, which comes out every Tuesday. Just this month, the long-time royal chronicler called the Netflix show With Love, Meghan “a buzzkill” and politely lambasted its protagonist for “her unerring instinct for getting it wrong” and for being “always brilliantly behind the curve”. 

Between two panel discussions and a last-minute book launch (for Rohit Chawla’s Raindogs), Brown hunkered in a makeshift media room at Jaipur’s Hotel Clarks Amer, the venue for the lit fest, to discuss magazines, media and what makes a good editor. Excerpts from the conversation below.   

What time of the day do you wake up? 

Early. I’m a very early riser, so I’m usually up by 5.45 in the morning.

And what’s the first thing you do when you wake up?

I’m afraid I reach for my phone. I scroll through every news channel, every Twitter feed. There I get my quick first burst of hard-edged news, and then I read everything. 

What’s the first thing you read today?

Oh gosh. Today I read...I mean just a series of Donald Trump commandments from the United States, so it was really about ‘let’s just check up on what the emperor has said this morning’, you know. 

Where do you go on the internet when you’re looking for news? 

I have a very, very eclectic list. You know, I do obviously read The New York Times. I actually read The Wall Street Journal first, which has become very, very good under Emma Tucker, and then I go to some of the British quality papers, like The Times, as well as The Telegraph, which has a different kind of point of view very often. Then there’s Politico, Axios, and Daily Mail. I think the Daily Mail has taken a downward dive, so I just read the first four or five stories. Then I go to different writers and look at contributions on Substack from people like Andrew Sullivan and Anand Giridharadas.

The news cycle is unceasing, especially for someone who tracks it for a living. Do you have any rituals or practices to revive your creativity?

When I interviewed Philip Roth in 2015, a few years before he died, I asked him, ‘Why aren’t you working on any novel?’ And he said, screens won. And that’s sad. But I think poetry is a big reviver. In the 19th century, poets were sort of rock stars, and I wonder whether poetry can have a really big comeback because you can get so much brain sustenance from reading it. I don’t like writing poetry but I love to read it—Philip Larkin and even young, modern poets like Deborah Garrison.

As a journalist, would you take notes during an interview or leave it to the voice recorder?

Well, I used to be a huge note-taker, but the last time I did that I realised that I had totally lost the art of taking notes. I simply can’t read my own handwriting. So now I’m a recorder kind of person, but the best thing for me is to be on the phone with somebody, taking notes on my computer. That works… Then I’m really listening well. The curse of Zoom is that you can’t just do that anymore. Now you have to be looking at someone and smiling; I hate that.

Do you ever think about what it’d be like to be a journalist today, when every piece of content is measured on virality and entertainment value?

I would hate that. I like to focus on the words and the sentences. I really do. And the fact that now you have to sort of chop it up into bits and make a TikTok video or do a podcast out of it... I mean, it’s too much output. But it seems to be now the norm for journalists—to do this surround sound to what they are writing. I think it’s actually a killer for a lot of writers. It stops their reporting because they have to stop and do all this surround sound. So, I’m not a fan of it. But if you’re a reporter on a news platform today, they’re going to expect you to do all of that. 

So how does one grab the limited and ever shrinking attention of their audience today?

I have always grabbed attention in different ways. I think the headline is still the most important thing. I’m now doing a Substack called Fresh Hell  and I think very much about what is going to be on that [subject] line when it goes out… the provocative question that makes people think ‘Oh, I must open this’. 

I mean, the whole game is seduction. When I did magazines, it was the cover lines. The cover lines have to make people pick up a magazine and buy it. They must have that element of curiosity, and I’m a total sucker for it. When I look at some cheesy website that says ‘The incredible moment that Melania Trump...’ I'm afraid I’ve got to open it.  

And it’s not just cover lines. On your Substack you recently called Meghan Markle’s blog “a strenuous knockoff of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop” and today I watched you describe Princess Diana as “gazelle tall”. How do you manage to deliver these punch lines whether you’re writing or talking… 

I just sort of speak as I think and I try to write as I think. The thing I value most about good writing is a voice, and that’s how I used to get my writers for Vanity Fair and for The New Yorker. I’d work with someone if I thought that writer has a voice. And that’s something I’d know by reading the first paragraph, or sometimes I’d be talking to someone, and I’d wonder if I could make them do that on the page.

We tried this with Dominick Dunne. When I first met Dominic, he wasn’t a writer; he was a failed film producer. He started talking to me at dinner about this terrible thing that had happened to his daughter, who was murdered, and he was going to the trial then. He began to talk and I thought he was an amazing observer. Actually, I think if you don’t notice the right things, then you’re not a writer. You can send a person to write about the best place but they will come back having seen nothing if they don’t observe. It’s the voice and what they are noticing. Most writing nowadays is done without going anywhere and I still think that physically being in a room with people is where you see things. 

Is that where you get your most creative ideas? 

No, actually, it’s [while] walking alone. The only problem is I like to listen to my podcasts as well and it’s beginning to eat into that thinking time. I also have very, very long showers. I know Napoleon used to sit in the bath for hours, but I like 20-minute showers—just stand there and I get a lot of thoughts in the shower. Particularly, the second shower of the day. I always like to have a 6 pm shower for the evening and then I really kind of revive myself with it and some of the thoughts just come together. When it comes to writing, I get progressively less creative as the day wears on, so by 4 pm I’m like done. I’m working but I don’t write my best stuff after that. 

What’s the biggest change you’ve noticed in the workplace today?

Well, no one is in the office, at least in New York. They work at home. Companies make every effort to get people back. I mean, banks have insisted now that people come back, but you walk into a publishing house and it’s just empty. It’s really sad. I went to do a podcast at The New York Times a year ago, and I walked through this empty newsroom!

And The Washington Post has been trying to get people back and they had this Slack discussion and I was just eyeballing that Slack as it was passing through and they’re all just moaning about how they want us to come back to work and how they can’t make us—“we’re not going to”—and I think to myself, ‘You know, you’re working where [Bob] Woodward and [Carl] Bernstein did, and you don’t have an appetite to come to work?’ I don’t get it. 

It’s pitiful because I think the best ideas come from real communication. The Vanity Fair office was like just such a sexy place to be. There were writers and editors and things happening in the art department, people coming to show their work and the excitement of a deadline. I mean, it was just a happening scene.

Everything changed with the internet—from how we write to how we consume content. And now it’s changing all over again with AI. Even writers are worried that ChatGPT will take over their jobs…

I think the ideal thing is if ChatGPT can be used for, say, company reports, which are badly written anyway. Even legislative stuff... Give that to ChatGPT. But when it comes to the creative part of it, I don’t think it’s going to be as good if we relied on it. 

Have you ever tried using it to see how it works?

I once did put in a prompt that said, ‘Write a piece about Meghan Markle in the manner of Tina Brown’ and out came a perfectly publishable piece. But frankly, I would have hated it to be under my byline. I didn’t think it was good. It was publishable but it had no voice and no originality. So maybe some of this boilerplate writing could be done by it. And of course, it’s going to put a lot of people out of work because there is an enormous amount of people who just sit there churning this stuff out.

At BOF Voices, you shared that you went without a raise for 14 years. That’s insane…

It happens all the time. You know, someone left the BBC recently. She’s talented, like the best woman there, and I was like, how did they lose her? The way they lost her is that she had been doing the same thing for the last 10 years and it’s like ‘you're in your box, stay there and don’t come to me and say you want to enlarge your horizons or something’.

And yet you finally managed to bring a paycheck that set new standards for female editors the world over… How can more women have these conversations in the workplace today?

If you can’t do it yourself, get someone to do it for you. The trouble is, women tend to believe it when a male boss says, ‘The bottom line is we just can’t’ or ‘We just don’t have the money right now to do this’. But the thing is, men never care about all that. They still go in and demand and eventually get it. So, stop believing people when they say that just because they don’t want to pay.