The media world has been stunned by the sudden resignation by Ms Tina Brown as editor of New Yorker magazine. Six years ago the former British journalist had also stunned the media world by becoming the first non-American and woman to edit the magazine which was regarded as an American institution under legendary editors Harold Ross and William Shawn.
While Ms Brown increased the circulation of the loss-making magazine by almost 50 per cent over six years, it continued to lose money - an estimated $11 million last year alone. Critics have also complained that the magazine under Ms Brown had shed its "other-worldly nature" and elegant writing in favour of a "tarty breathlessness". One notorious cover showed a nude Ms Demi Moore in an advanced stage of pregnancy.
Responding to critics who said she had vulgarised the magazine, Ms Brown said: "I've always believed in lapses of taste."
Ms Brown, who is married to Mr Harold Evans, a former editor of the Sunday Times, will become co-founder of a multi-media company affiliated with Miramax Films which will produce a new monthly magazine linked to film production and television programming.
There have been rumours in recent months that Ms Brown (44) was becoming unhappy with her position in the Conde-Nast magazine empire which owns the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, which Ms Brown had also edited with considerable success.
Mr S.I. Newhouse, owner of the group, is said to have offered Ms Brown a new multi-million dollar contract but she turned it down in favour of the new venture. "I couldn't stand the thought of getting married for five more years," she told her upset staff yesterday hours after signing the Miramax deal.
Ms Brown is the daughter of George Brown, a British film producer who made the first Agatha Christie films, and of Bettina Brown who was once Laurence Olivier's press agent. Ms Brown, who went to Oxford, made her name by changing London's Tatler from a conventional society magazine to a trendy, gossipy publication.
Mr Newhouse brought her to New York to edit the ailing Vanity Fair, where she succeeded in quadrupling its circulation by hiring star photographers and writers. She went to the New Yorker in 1992 and in six years boosted the circulation from 628,000 to 809,000 and won 10 national magazine awards.
She became known as "the Queen of Buzz" because of the magazine's reputation for creating controversy with occasional shocking covers and articles such as the recent one on the life of a dominatrix with graphic descriptions of her methods. But there have also been brilliant articles on foreign affairs, politics and the media world.
Mr Evans last year resigned his position as head of the Random House publishing group which is also owned by Mr Newhouse. He is now editorial director of a group which owns the New York Daily News and the weekly US News and World Report.