By Gabriel Snyder

January 27, 2002 | 7:00 p.m

This has been a rough season in the print media, but among those

who watch closely, few were surprised by the deflation and slow settling to ground of the grand balloon known as Talk . For like some turn-of-the-century hot-air balloon-the kind with gilded gondolas and loud gas jets filling their air chambers-there was something unwieldy and antiquated about Talk: It didn't travel as fast as other, more modern forms of communication, or as fast as it should have to match its editor's aviatrix-like instincts. And as others of their style began losing air and drunkenly spiraling down- George , Brill's Content , Mademoiselle - Talk 's short flight looked imperiled as well, despite the truly glittering smile of its captain, who continued to wave and express confidence all the while in its incessant descent until it dropped-klump! Then she emerged with the desultory smile of an around-the-world balloonist brought down in Peoria. There were adjunct reverberations in Park City, Utah-where part-owner Harvey Weinstein was shopping for new independent movies at the Sundance Film festival-and Los Angeles, where Talk 's premonitory wake had been held, unknowingly, a party preceding the Golden Globe Awards. Talk magazine may have started as, among other things, Tina Brown's entrepreneurial urge for independence after some tense New Yorker jousting with Steve Florio at Condé Nast, and Harvey Weinstein's fascinated need to have and hold a media property. And though it's true she entered at the top of page 1 of The New York Times , and exited two years later at the bottom, Ms. Brown and Mr. Weinstein pretty much went out as they went in-dispensing glittery, amusing $50 million quotes as their lieutenants fended for themselves. On the chilly afternoon of Friday, Jan. 18, outside Talk 's Chelsea offices, the very reporting hordes Talk depended on-and now was complaining had brought it down-waited to give Ms. Brown either the Marilyn Monroe or the Norma Desmond treatment by getting a big quote. The media pack, looking at the fall of Talk like a steamed dumpling stuffed with Schadenfreude , waited for an epitaph to a magazine to which few had any particular emotional allegiance-as many had with Life or the Saturday Evening Post or Lingua Franca - but which they remembered mostly for a party on Liberty Island on a strange, humid evening in 1999. That was the party, of course, to which they'd been invited with Madonna, Henry Kissinger and about a million gallons of sponsored liquor, the party that-remember?-the magazine's then-avowed enemy, Rudy Giuliani, had kept out of the Brooklyn Navy Yards. For political reasons. Ms. Brown's explanations for Talk 's demise: a somewhat opportunistic assigning of blame to Sept. 11; a rotten economy prior; the crushing weight of expectations no start-up magazine had ever faced. (Although she might have honored her own signal triumph by remembering that Vanity Fair had far grander expectations and was a bigger flop, before she showed up to save it in the 1980's.) Behind the scenes, there was scattered, equally predictable noise: Hearst was cheap, Miramax was profligate, Ms. Brown wasn't the glamour surgeon she'd been in the Reagan years. Now Ms. Brown suggested that the media should be less gleeful at Talk 's demise. "When you think about it, with Talk gone, where do you place a sophisticated story now?" she said to Off the Record. "You could do it for The New Yorker , but that's highly competitive with a whole bunch of staff writers who mostly write it. The Time and Newsweek s of the world are really mainstream, and you couldn't write a really risqué piece for those publications. The New York Times is also very conservative. And Vanity Fair has its sort of established roster. "There's not many places to submit a piece at this point," she said. "There's really a death of places to write. So I think when people say, 'Was there a reason for Talk ?' Yes, there's a reason for Talk . We did provide outlets for a whole bunch of other writers, and they were writing for our pages and loving doing it." Mr. Weinstein sounded a more bottom-line note, with a complaint at the shark-stocked nature of the media pool. "I was surprised that members of the media didn't see Talk as a chance to create more jobs in the industry," he responded to a written question from Off the Record. "While there's obviously competitiveness in the movie industry, there is an appreciation for competitors providing opportunities for those in the industry to work." Left unanswered: what Talk 's farewell meant for prospects in the genre Ms. Brown had so successfully reinvigorated, first at Tatler , then at Vanity Fair and at The New Yorker : Tina Brown was supposedly the woman who had saved the general-interest magazine, and it had been there that Talk had a terrible weight upon itself. If Talk had promise, it was because it could be-once you got past Gwyneth, Heather and then, as things descended, Estella and Gwyneth once more-a magazine. Ms. Brown, who had been marketed, hoisted and made a 60 Minutes subject, the first really well-known editor since Jann Wenner, was supposed to make things levitate. But Talk never quite became a magazine-in the sense that Playboy or Sports Illustrated or Ladies Home Journal is a magazine you know and can come to terms with. After its initial kind of cool physical appearance as a stapled, sleek, oversized magazine in the tradition of English Sunday supplements and Hello! That suggested a raffish feature newsmagazine with a short lead-time, it returned to the usual lumbering American perfect-bound format, and then to indistinguishability. In the end, Ms. Brown said what editors say when it happens: She wished she had more time. She wished she had more time to perfect her magazine before it was reviewed, more time from her two backers, Hearst Magazines and Miramax Films, more time to find new investors. Like scores of editors before her who were told by their financiers that the money was being turned off, Ms. Brown maintained right up until the announcement that Talk would close-without even printing its next issue with Courtney Love on the cover-that she just needed a few more issues to prove that Talk could be a success. "For us, being a single title in the conglomerate world, as it were, was so incredibly difficult," said Ms. Brown. "You know, you spend all your time in that war, and so little time in the end is spent on the creative stuff, which is the lifeblood of what you do. And so much time is spent in a crouched position in the dugout." At least six months ago, it became clear to Talk that they would need another investor to keep the magazine going. Hearst was starting to signal that it did not want to continue underwriting half the losses of starting up a general-interest magazine, sources close to the situation told Off the Record. So Ms. Brown and Ron Galotti, the prodigious, aggressive publisher who was Talk' s president, began seeking out a new investor. Miramax Films, which had put up the other half of Talk , would continue to back them, they thought. This past summer, Ms. Brown was confident that she would be able to find someone to replace Hearst. Prior to Sept. 11, she said, "we would have definitely found another partner. There were two people in particular we talked to who really wanted to be in the magazine." Ms. Brown wouldn't say who the two potential investors were, but a source close to Talk identified the two likely investors as Conrad Black, the chief executive of newspaper publisher Hollinger International, and David Pecker, chief executive of supermarket-tabloid publisher American Media Inc. (Hollinger International did not respond to requests for comment, although the company confirmed in other reports that it had once considered investing in Talk but decided to pass. A spokesman for American Media would neither confirm nor deny that Mr. Pecker had looked at the magazine.) "The problem was," Ms. Brown said, "they could live with our pre–Sept. 11 business plan, but what no one can take was having to double the number for the next year of losses." By Monday, Jan. 14, after a meeting with Hearst and Miramax, it became clear that Hearst's patience was gone and it was pulling out, said one source who spoke to Ms. Brown after that meeting.  The final decision, however, sat with Miramax. Would it continue to back Talk , a magazine that had been a long-term fascination of Mr. Weinstein's and which, with his political participation in the Gore campaign and his undisputed triumphs in Hollywood, would have-if it had succeeded-made him a triple-threat power. Ms. Brown, the source said, thought the magazine's end was near, but was convinced she would get a few more issues-issues which she believed were the strongest since the magazine started. March was to have Ms. Love on the cover, April, Tom Cruise-which she could use to round up a new investor. "Really, the magazine since last summer has been really good," Ms. Brown said. "I think the magazine gelled, and it happened at Vanity Fair , although people love to forget it, but it took two years to get that team right." On Wednesday, Jan. 16,with the March issue still closing, Ms. Brown and Mr. Galotti headed to Los Angeles where Talk was throwing a party for the Golden Globe awards, crucial to any studio's Oscar campaigns, and Mr. Weinstein was to head there from the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. When Ms. Brown and Mr. Galotti got to the Mondrian Hotel, where they were to host their party, Ms. Brown got a call from Mr. Weinstein telling her he had decided he couldn't shoulder all of Talk on his own, and that the magazine would close down immediately. That meant the March issue would never be published. Ms. Brown, sources said, began lobbying Hearst and Miramax officials to print the March issue. Partly, they said, because she was proud of it, and partly because she wanted to buy time to seek a new investor. Attendees of the party, held in the Mondrian's restaurant Asia de Cuba, said it was hardly lively. Missing were the Miramax stars, like Judi Dench, and the studio's staff. Most conspicuously absent was Mr. Weinstein, who was hosting a party in Park City, Utah, for Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, both of whom are featured in upcoming Miramax films. Many partygoers in Los Angeles took the down-beat note of the party as sign. "To me the alarm bells went off when Harvey went to Utah with Russell and Nicole," one source said. Many noticed that Ms. Brown spent a long while talking alone out by the restaurant's pool with Michael Eisner, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company. The conversation wasn't heated, sources said, but serious and determined, and the two seemed to make it clear that other people were not welcome to join it. In Ms. Brown's effort to publish one last issue of Talk , since Miramax is a subsidiary of Disney, winning Mr. Eisner's support could have been crucial. Early on the morning of Friday, January 18, Ms. Brown and Mr. Galotti flew back to New York to meet with their staff. At Talk , which was still closing the March issue, when the meeting was announced around noon on Friday, speculation began to swirl. Some believed that Talk was going to be closed down. Editorial director Maer Roshan believed that Ms. Brown and Mr. Galotti were bringing back good news. On Wednesday, Mr. Roshan, who thought speculation about Talk 's future was distracting his staff during the close, asked Mr. Galotti to update them on the search for investors, sources said. Mr. Galotti had agreed, and Mr. Roshan thought that the meeting was the one he had asked for. But, in fact, it was not. Ms. Brown, Mr. Galotti, Hearst Magazines chief executive Cathie Black and Miramax executive vice president Charles Layton announced that Talk was over. Then the recriminations began. In the three-way pull to avoid blame for a failed magazine launch that reportedly burned through $50 million, Hearst is being accused by some at Talk and Miramax of undermining the magazine. In December, when speculation that Hearst was on the verge of pulling out of the magazine began to intensify, Ms. Black stood behind a statement that "we support" Talk 's efforts to find new investors and "expect that we will have a continuing relationship with the magazine." At Talk , it was seen as damning with faint praise, and since the staff felt increasingly under siege from the press and now Hearst, very damaging to the very efforts Hearst said it supported. "For the past year, it seems they have done everything in their power to shorten the life of the magazine," said one close source. "They didn't just want to remove themselves from the magazine, they didn't want any magazine." Ms. Black was out of the country on Jan. 22 and unavailable for comment. A spokesperson for Hearst said, "We can't imagine why someone would say this while Hearst was investing dollar for dollar alongside Miramax. It was in everyone's best interest that the magazine succeed." Meanwhile, the very press that had mythologized Ms. Brown, Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Galotti as print powerhouses suddenly were seen as the dirty rotten scoundrels who were dragging it down. The press counted the ad pages, complaining that Talk was nothing but Vanity Fair Jr. , watching the non-stop revolving door of hires, retreats, announcements, raids and inside scuffles. And the one thing that just worked-the book business-run by Jonathan Burnham and launching best-sellers and prestige publications from Simon Schama, Martin Amis and the astonishing, fortuitous signing of Mayor Giuliani-did nothing but make the magazine look bad in contrast. Asked if she would do anything differently now, Ms. Brown said, after three years of hyping a magazine built largely on her own celebrity, she wished she had kept a lower profile. She brought up a conversation she had with the founder of women's cable network, Oxygen. "When I ran into Geraldine Laybourne recently," Ms. Brown said, "they were very unhappy about the fact that they didn't have a New York outlet. And I said, 'You're so lucky that you don't have a New York outlet. There's been huge amount of turbulence over there, in terms of people coming and going and so forth, but their programs weren't being reviewed." In December, the three-year old Oxygen won a slot on New York City cable. "I don't know what their shows are going to be like," said Ms. Brown, "but you'd think after two years they've probably got it in much better shape than if they had just opened on Broadway. One thing that would have been great is that I wish we would have had an out-of-town try-out." And Ms. Brown volunteered that she had a lot of difficulty editing a monthly after seven years of editing the weekly New Yorker . Asked if she would edit another magazine, Ms. Brown said, "And if I were to do it again, I would never do a monthly again. I think monthlies are a killer. It's too long." She added, "I think the culture is moving very fast and the whole kind of laborious pre-historic kind of minuet to the close, locked in aspects two or three weeks before you publish, it just felt like agony" For now, Ms. Brown said she plans to stay as chairman of Talk Miramax Books, the wholly owned subsidiary of Miramax, which is set to publish two books by former Mayor Giuliani, as well as a memoir by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. As for herself, she ruled out publishing her own diaries, kept since age 12, except as a last resort. "I think my diary will be something at some point when I'm 75,  when the bailiffs are taking my furniture out, I'll cash in then," said Tina Brown. Bill Colson's sudden departure as the managing editor of Sports Illustrated didn't just signal a shakeup for the venerable-yet-creaky jock weekly; it also marked the arrival of John Huey as a cage-rattling force within Time Inc. Five months into his tenure as Time Inc.'s editorial director, Mr. Huey, the 53-year-old former managing editor of the Fortune Group , has already shown a willingness to personally intercede in publications he perceives to be on the down slope. Sports Illustrated may have simply been the first; People and Entertainment Weekly could be next on Mr. Huey's hit list, a Time Inc. source said. Another source said that the new editorial director was dissatisfied with all the magazines he oversees "except for Fortune and Money ." Mr. Huey declined to be interviewed for this story. But sources at Time Inc. said that he has established himself as a far more aggressive manager than his predecessors, Walter Isaacson and Henry Muller. As one Time Inc. executive put it: "No [other editorial director] has flexed his muscles as much as Huey already has. Even Walter didn't flex his muscles as much as Huey." There were early signs that Mr. Huey would be a shakeup artist, however. When Mr. Huey took over for Mr. Isaacson after the latter went to run CNN, Time Inc. editor in chief Norm Pearlstine changed the editorial director's role. Instead of focusing on the broad synergies of AOL Time Warner properties, Mr. Huey would have a more direct, day-to-day control over the company's flagship titles. (Mr. Pearlstine, too, declined to be interviewed for this story). Mr. Huey's rise surprised few people inside or outside the company. Ever since Mr. Pearlstine joined Time Inc. from The Wall Street Journal , Mr. Huey has served as his fixer: an affable man who will deliver results, but one who can be ruthless in his execution. Just a month into Mr. Pearlstine's tenure, he replaced Fortune 's managing editor, Walter Kiechel, with Mr. Huey, who proceeded to quickly remake the staff. Then, when Mr. Huey was given oversight of Money in 1997, longtime editor Frank Lalli was forced out the door in favor of Fortune senior editor and Wunderkind Bob Safian. "I think that's an indication of how things are going to go," one Time Inc. source said, referring to Mr. Huey's scorched-earth past. "He got rid of a lot of people at Fortune very fast, and he told the remaining people, 'Get on the program or leave.' And then he treated Money the same way. That was just bloody over there." As editorial director, Mr. Huey's been tinkering with small parts of Time Inc. for a number of months. According to sources, Mr. Huey has been visiting Time to talk to staffers and chat with managing editor Jim Kelly. Last fall, according to sources, with Mr. Kelly on vacation, he attended a 10 a.m. meeting in which editors debated whether they should put President George W. Bush on the cover. When one editor raised an objection, according to a source, Mr. Huey shot back, "Who cares what you think?" (Mr. Kelly did not return phone calls for this story.) But Sports Illustrated was the first publication to be on the receiving end of a  thunderbolt from Mr. Huey. Long considered the finest sports magazine in the country, the perception was that SI had fallen into something of a rut, especially when compared the sassy, graphics-heavy ESPN the Magazine , SI 's first serious competitor in years. According to company sources, Mr. Pearlstine had been dissatisfied with Mr. Colson's performance since he won the job in 1995. But it was Mr. Huey who finally initiated the move to do something about it. Following a series of focus groups viewed via satellite simulcast at AOL Time Warner's building at 75 Rockefeller Plaza beginning in early November, Mr. Huey became convinced that the magazine "was for 50-year-old white guys who play golf five times a week," one SI source said. Then on Nov. 27, in a Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, Mr. Huey met with four of the magazine's West Coast writers and expressed concern about the magazine. One of the writers who was there, Michael Silver, said the meeting wasn't a bitch-fest. "It wasn't as if we sat around complaining," said Mr. Silver. "I thought the meeting was constructive and on a positive note." But sources in New York said the meeting represented a harbinger of things to come. "Right after it happened," said one SI source, "everyone here knew about it. That's when we knew major changes were coming." Given the command to implement major if not really necessary changes, sources said, Mr. Colson decided to call it quits. (Mr. Colson declined to comment for this story.) But even before Mr. Colson's decision to leave, Mr. Huey stepped in and made changes with SI content-even terminating pieces he didn't like. One such piece was a column by Steve Rushin about a golf outing with Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura for the Oct. 1 issue. According to one SI source, the column "just didn't work" for Mr. Huey. When Mr. Colson tried to intercede on Mr. Rushin's behalf, saying the columnist might quit if the magazine didn't run it, the source said Mr. Huey responded: "Let him quit." Mr. Rushin didn't return a call seeking comment. But Mr. Huey's meddling in content was seen by some SI staffers as an ominous sign. "You don't get your column killed," said one SI source. "Its sacrilege. A column is a column. You do what you do." Mr. Huey also stepped in to torpedo a mid-November piece written by a freelance writer about the heavy financial losses of Major League Baseball. Commissioned by Mr. Colson, it was written by Andew Zimbalist, a Smith College economics professor and author of the book Baseball and Billions. Mr. Zimbalist said that the 1,500-word piece had gone through various editors who all expressed happiness with it, only to be struck down in the early-morning hours on Monday, as the magazine closed. When he asked why, Mr. Zimbalist was told the piece had been killed by an outside editor. Said one SI source: "Huey reached in and killed it." "I thought it was wrong for an outside editor to kill an initiated and approved piece," Mr. Zimbalist said. "Furthermore, it's indicative of the difficult position Sports Illustrated 's in as part of AOL Time Warner, which, as owner of the Atlanta Braves, has a relationship with Major League Baseball. How can they claim to be objective if an outside editor has such control?" While it's extremely unlikely Mr. Huey was acting on orders from baseball commissioner Bud Selig in putting the kibosh on the economics piece, it does appear that Time Inc.'s new editorial director has a Steinbrennerian flair. Mr. Huey is meeting with SI editors and writers about rejiggering the magazine one again, and as for successors for Mr. Colson, the two most talked-about candidates are US Weekly 's Terry McDonnell and Roy Johnson of Savoy . And that figures to be the first of many shifts at Time Inc.'s publications during the John Huey era. According to one company executive, Mr. Huey is the clear favorite to succeed Mr. Pearlstine, whose contract reportedly expires at the end of 2003. "Norm's in the back seat for the most part," said another Time Inc. source. "He's more than happy to do the other stuff he's doing. But Huey's pretty much got free rein." -Sridhar Pappu