The New York Observer » Tina Brown

Novels From the Edge: For Helen DeWitt, the Publishing World Is a High-Stakes Game

The first time Helen DeWitt disappeared was in 2000. Her debut novel, The Last Samurai, was on the verge of becoming a publishing sensation. It would eventually sell more than 100,000 copies in English and be translated into 20 languages. People told Ms. DeWitt she was a star. Tina Brown, the owner of Talk Miramax Read More

‘Newsweek’ Wants You to Help Name Employee’s New Baby

Interesting: Most soon-to-be parents squabble for months over baby names. But if you work at Tina Brown's Newsweek, one of the nice perks is that you can just put the question to your magazine's 1,500,000+ Twitter and Tumblr followers and let them decide for you! At least, that's what Deputy Editor Paula Szuchman was forced by Tina Brown to do in an attempt to boost the company's image as a warm, friendly work environment chose to do.
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Another Famous Lady on the Cover of Newsweek

Angelina Jolie covers this week's Newsweek, keeping with the Tina Brown tendency to feature bold face name women and with a black background design that harkens back to her Talk days. It might even be working at little, as Newsweek subscription renewals rose last month for the first time in 2006, according to Read More

Executive Editor Edward Felsenthal Departs Daily Beast

In the past week, the Newsweek Daily Beast Company has lost three high-level staffers and recouped some long-lost Newsweek veterans, suggesting a major overhaul as executive management comes to grips with a disappointing first year. Early last week, Tina Brown announced that she’d lured back Dan Klaidman, a longtime managing editor of Newsweek and its Read More

Dan Klaidman Returns to Newsweek

A former Newsweek veteran, Dan Klaidman, has rejoined The Newsweek Daily Beast Company, editor in chief Tina Brown announced to staff today. Read More

Daily Beast TV Goes Live

As an in-house advertisement in the Halloween issue of Newsweek promised, Tina Brown’s dormant TV career is back from the dead. Daily Beast TV, the online video channel The Observer first caught wind of in July, has launched on the Beast's website. Though none of the shows bear the name of Ms. Brown’s erstwhile CNBC Read More

The Daily Beast and Amanda Knox’s Trial By Media

Over the past two years, while most American coverage of the Meredith Kercher murder case either played the story straight or raised questions about the competence of the Italian justice system, Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast followed the lead of the British tabloids, dishing on the sexual proclivities and bizarre comportment of Amanda Knox, sometimes Read More

Former Daily Beast Columnist Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Does Tina Brown have a mole on the Nobel judges panel or is she just prescient? In September, The Daily Beast's publishing arm, Beast Books, published a memoir by Liberian peace activist and Daily Beast contributor Leymah Gbowee called Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War (such a Tina Brown title!) Not three weeks later, Ms. Gbowee was one of three women to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Read More

Marie Claire Editor Abigail Pesta Will Lead Tina Brown’s Women’s Initiative

Newsweek and The Daily Beast have hired Abigail Pesta, Marie Claire editor-at-large, to serve as editorial director of women's issues, including content pegged to the expanding Women in the World initiative, The Observer has learned. Tina Brown's Women in the World Summit, conceived of in 2010 and programmed by Kyle Gibson, is slated to occur Read More

What If Magazine Editors Weren’t So Literal?

Soros is Thrown a Lawsuit While Pawlenty Throws in the Towel

The riots in London seem finally to have subsided, but strange things are afoot stateside this week, so much so that we’re starting to wonder if Mercury, which went retrograde Aug. 3, is currently doing to the entire planet what it once did so publicly to Jeremy Piven. (Also, when does the statute of limitations Read More

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Steinem [Updated]

Gloria Steinem either was or was not interested in talking about The Playboy Club, the upcoming NBC series depicting the milieu in the buxom-bunny warrens where she’d worked, undercover, in the 1960s. “It’s defunct, it doesn’t exist anymore,” she told The Transom, adding to comments in another interview in which she told Reuters she hoped Read More

Wayne Barrett is Still Adjusting to Life Inside Tina Brown’s Head

Is there any greater indignity than seeing Wayne Barrett's byline at the Daily Beast? Yes. It is hearing about his assignments from Tina Brown--the magazine editor of our lifetime, as he calls her--in this incredible NY1 profile that we have no idea how to embed. "The first assignment I got was to do a Read More

News Cruise For Displaced Newsweek.com Crew

Susanna Schrobsdorff, former editorial director of Newsweek Digital, recently spoke to The Transom about a group of fellow newsweek.com alumnis' booze cruise around Manhattan this Saturday (as first reported in the Eight-Day Week). “The last round of people in the buyout group just left,” Ms. Schrobsdorff, who departed the company in December 2010, said Read More

Petanque Hits the Hamptons and Dancers Dance in Fire Island in the Eight-Day Week

Wednesday, July 13 Hoisted by Your Own Petanque We’re in those post-Fourth doldrums, in which it seems the sticky heat won’t ever end—we miss our blazers! We used to look professional! But at least we’re one up on the men in sandals, waggling their ill-kept toes at us as we skulk over to Read More