Tim Barrus in the New York Times: The Rich Speak
Mainstream publishing is like a cat with one life. The New York Times interviews Tina Brown. This is like the pot speaks to the kettle. Tina Brown is orthodox print publishing. Her digital experiments were flirtations. She doesn’t want to be a player in the one-cat, one-life feline in a dog and pony show. Pet metaphors aside…
Either do I.
What Tina Brown has to say about the Royal Family has always existed as click-bait. Her analysis of the massive royal disruption of culture in the United Kingdom is a burlap bag of cats.
Brown always played cat and mouse with whatever the truth is. David Remnick at the New Yorker is the contemporary giver and the explainer (after all, we’re stupid) of the truth. Exactly where does New York publishing get off being the movers and shapers of the truth.
Remnick is stuck in the credibility constructs of the past. Producing a podcast with access to the kind of talent Remick has – a lot of which Brown attracted in the first place – is a dog chasing its own tail. How many times can you appear at the 92nd Street YMCA.
The real viability issue inherent to publishing, one that is not remotely touched upon in this interview, or in any other interview, where any other publishing accomplice interviews another accomplice, is what is the gatekeeper’s role today. Editors are not the royal family. They’re about as glamorous as my mother in-law. Brown brings some spark it. But the show is completely canned.
It’s a can that has an echo when you speak into it. That echo is connected to a string that is affixed to another can. Perhaps someday Tina Brown will talk about how publishing itself is anchored to an undercurrent of meanness on the part of the people able to transcend the solid walls insiders like herself and Remnick have erected to keep the riffraff out.