Why magazine mogul Tina Brown is ‘angry and upset’ at Google and Facebook
Why magazine mogul Tina Brown is ‘angry and upset’ at
Google and Facebook
It’s time for the most powerful companies in digital
media to stop playing dumb, Brown says.
BY ERIC JOHNSON NOV 20, 2017, 6:30AM EST
Tina Brown, author of “The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983 -
1992” Brigitte Lacombe
Starting in her 20s as the editor of Tatler Magazine in
London, Tina Brown rode a wave of print magazines to become one of the most
influential people in the media. She tells a good portion of that story in her
new no-holds-barred memoir, “The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983 - 1992.”
But after editing Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and the
short-lived Talk magazine (which was financed by Harvey Weinstein), Brown moved
her editing online, founding the Daily Beast in 2008. On the latest episode of
Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, she explained why she left that
publication after six years, and why the new power players in media — tech
companies like Google and Facebook — have left her feeling frustrated.
“I am very angry and upset about the way advertising
revenue has been essentially pirated by the Facebook-Google world, without
nearly enough giveback — no giveback, really — to the people who create those
brilliant pieces that are posted all over their platforms,” Brown said. “It’s
high time they gave back to journalism.”
She proposed the creation of a “huge journalism fund” for
local media, even though she doubts that that would ever happen.
“They have no interest, I realize that,” Brown said.
“It’s like, ‘Oh, we’re not a media company, we’re a platform.’ Okay, well,
guess what? When you don’t have human beings who have judgment, who have taste,
who have a sense of responsibility, you can have any old Russian hacker dishing
it out to the American public.”
“Opinion-forming, influential content, it’s very hard to
find and support and have an impact with,” she added. “People don’t know what’s
important or where to find it. So it doesn’t wash to say, ‘There’s so many
transactions, everybody can find it.’ It’s a needle in a haystack for so many
people.”
You can listen to Recode Decode on Apple Podcasts,
Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
On the new podcast, Brown said she’s also concerned about
how the global reach of social media platforms could over-amplify voices that
don’t represent how most people feel, or shouldn’t be the loudest in the room.
“A flash mob can suddenly form very, very quickly around
a person, and wow!” Brown said. “Suddenly, their reputation is shredded, and
they’re sent spinning by the dissent of a thousand people writing abusive stuff
about them. It’s a frightening thing, actually. It can lead to a lot of stress
and dangerous emotions, and ultimately could lead to violence.”
“You know, I think we’ve also seen the empowering of a
lot of delinquent voices, in a sense,” she added. “In the past, [they] would be
some crazy person muttering in a bar. All of a sudden, there’s a huge community
around those voices and they have influence and power and they can multiply,
and that adds to the toxicity of the culture.”
If journalists are looking for hope among the tech giants
of Silicon Valley, Brown said, their best bet might be Apple.
“Steve Jobs was a topographer himself, he always cared
about design,” she said. “There’s a sense of excellence there that has always
been about rejection of the mediocre. I am hoping that they might step in to do
something really good in journalism.”
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