Tina Brown Returns to the Web: Train Wreck Ahead!

Tina Brown knows absolutely nothing about running Web sites, and her disastrous record with Talk.com should have resulted in her being banned from the Web forever. Unfortunately, it's impossible to do this, and so Brown is reaping tons of press with her plans to launch a new site that's going to blah blah blah. Big deal - she hired away the creative director from nymag.com - if this guy's such a hotshot, why can't Nymag.com beat Gawker.com in the traffic wars? The whole thing is a joke and I'm sure that whatever Brown comes up will be a ghost site within 18 months of its launch.

Tina Brown, it's Time To Shut Up

It must be terrible to be a former media queen, so terrible that it makes you say terrible things, like "everybody's famous today but nobody's interesting," and think terrible thoughts, like "people in 2007 are still interested in what happened to Princess Diana in 1997." So you write your terrible book, and your terrifying team of agents, publishing flacks, ass-kissers and sycophantic radio hosts treats you as if you were still on top, running The New Yorker into the ground, then frittering in cyberspace, where you launched Talk.com, a laughably specious dotcom and dead-tree magazine property funded by Miramax and Hearst that was just a glossy reflective mirror for your super media elite friends, including Hillary Clinton.

The whole point of Talk Magazine was clear: it was set up so that you could own the rights to articles that were green-lightable for Hollywood, skimming big profits when they were made into movies. You never took the Web, or the Talk.com web site seriously, and surviving screenshots prove that talk.com was nothing more than a flattering mirror for you and your powerful pals:

Talk.com (1)
Talk.com (2)
Talk.com (3)
Talk.com (4)
Talk.com (5)
Talk.com (6)
Talk.com (7)
Talk.com (8)
Talk.com (9)
Talk.com (10)
Talk.com (11)
Talk.com (12)
Talk.com (13)

When you were done with Talk.com, you bounced gracefully from a CNBC cable show that nobody watched to a vacuous column at the Washington Post that nobody read.

Tina Brown, you're done and can go home now. America's love for royalty has run out. We're locked in a brutal, endless war, up to our ears in debt, drugged up, burned out, preparing for the next Internet bubble to burst, and Diana isn't even a mote on our collective bloodshot eye anymore. Life isn't a party, nobody outside the media elite gives a damn about you or Diana, but that won't stop you. The usual book industry-style payola will surely keep your latest tome on the top of the bestseller charts.

You had a good run, Tina Brown. But we're not buying the fish you're selling today. I know you hate the Web and the whole idea of free conent. But if you really want to tell us, not sell us something, get over to YouTube and share your thoughts about Diana with us for free. Some of us with a great deal of time on our hands might even watch you and think that trashing a long-dead princess is a worthy project. Just don't ask us for $27.95 to bankroll it.