She's the best magazine editor alive. What more can I say?

Michael Kinsley, editor, Slate

She creates the most interesting magazines, finds the hottest journalists and has her hand on the cultural Zeitgeist.

Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman, Miramax Films

I could not have wished a worse fate for her than a job at Miramax. I hope that Mr. Shawn, wherever he is, is happy. I will dance on her grave for him.

Jamaica Kincaid, former New Yorker staff writer

After Tina Brown quit The New Yorker, she became the recipient of sentimental valedictories — followed by loud and bitter excoriation. If the attacks seemed a bit much, Brown had no one to blame but herself. Here was an editor who kept a full-time personal publicist on staff, who staged parties that began where glitz left off, who provoked fresh outrages every week merely to create conversation. Small wonder that she became a victim of her own self-created myth as Lady of Miracles, Savior of Ailing Magazines, when she departed from Condé Nast to start a new periodical at Miramax Films, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company.

To her critics, this is where she belonged all along — pitching movie ideas and creating hype for the wiseguys of Celluloid City. Tina bashers thought they had her number back in 1992, when she left her day job to become the fourth editor in The New Yorker's storied history (after Harold Ross, William Shawn, and Robert Gottlieb). The week Brown moved in, John R. MacArthur, president of Harper's Magazine, commented succinctly, "It's the triumph of sleaze and salesmanship over quality. The idea of the editor of Vanity Fair being made editor of The New Yorker is like moving Trump Tower to the middle of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden."

But others could hardly wait to see the changes that Brown was bound to make — the more extreme the better. To them the magazine had become sclerotic and self-absorbed. It was time to stop this absurd ancestor worship. Harold Ross had been dead since 1951 for God's sake. Ross had been notorious for asking questions like, "Was Moby Dick the man or the whale?" and dismissing film criticism as a job category fit "for women and fairies."

Since 1985, The New Yorker had been under the baton of Si Newhouse, who paid $168 million for the privilege of owning a brand name in decline. Newhouse is a believer in buzz über alles, and in seven years he ran through two editors (Shawn and Gottlieb) until he landed on Brown. Her smooth amalgam of incivility, puffery, and legitimate investigative journalism had made Vanity Fair a magazine to Si for.

With Brown, as with Oscar Wilde, there was only one thing worse than being talked about, and that was not being talked about. Thus began The New Yorker's new philosophy. The weekly must rid itself of all traces of the irrelevant, the unhip. It must be relevant, connected, sprightly. The magazine trashed its hallowed traditions. Had photography been barred? Very well then, Act I would bring the regular use of Richard Avedon's superchic work. Had there been a sixty-seven-year prohibition of offensive material? Act II would feature four-letter, and even twelve-letter words never uttered in the halls of the old New Yorker, let alone in its sacrosanct pages. The week that Shawn died, the magazine happened to be running a cartoon with a candidate barred from heaven; he is wearing a t-shirt saying, "Shit Happens."

The old New Yorker cared nothing for the who's-hot-who's-not school of journalism. That magazine was driven by words, not faces; by ideas, not celebrity. Had there been an O.J. Simpson trial in the old regime, it would scarcely have been mentioned. Racial and ethnic tensions were not to be exploited, certainly not to be joked about. The notion of offending anyone would have prohibited all but the most tasteful commentary on religion.

The Tina years, however, featured a revolution in manners. Often, there were no manners at all. O.J. was parsed and discussed in a manner indistinguishable from Geraldo's. The black-vs.-Jewish battles of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, were lampooned in a cover showing a Hasid amorously embracing a black woman. One spring issue featured the Easter bunny crucified. Another caricatured the famous V-E day photograph of a sailor kissing a young woman. This drawing showed two male sailors smooching.

The new New Yorker was still edited in midtown Manhattan, but its sensibilities were rooted farther south, in the heart of the fashion district. In that arena three things are all-important: imagery, shock, and merchandising. For Brown these became the touchstones of New Yorker journalism. "Will a racy cover line encourage a reader to read a serious and challenging 10,000 word piece?" she asked rhetorically. "If it does, hooray. That's what it's about. Marketing. You have to market the pieces today. . . . I'm completely obsessed with the need to seduce readers all the time. I feel that we're in a fight. A war. We just have to get their attention.".

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