From the living room of Barry Diller’s Manhattan apartment in the Carlyle Hotel, it is possible, on a clear day, to see the Midtown skyline, where the Condé Nast building rises like a ziggurat from the Gilded Age of magazine journalism. The view was an appropriate one for a man who in the autumn of 2010 was about to pour millions of dollars into the dead tree business.

Diller runs IAC, a portfolio of Internet companies that includes Match.com, OkCupid and Vimeo. His tolerance for risk is such that his friend David Geffen once described the fireplug of a billionaire as having “elephant balls.” Diller’s bets often pay off. He owns one of the biggest sailing yachts in the world. His neighbor is Mick Jagger. Print journalism, though, would be a different kind of gamble for him.

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Joining Diller in his living room was 92-year-old stereo magnate Sidney Harman. A few weeks earlier, Harman had paid $1 to buy Newsweek from the Washington Post Co. The once-proud magazine was in a death spiral, having lost more than $70 million in the previous two years, after various failed efforts to save it had only resulted in circulation plunging to half of what it had been a few years earlier, an exodus of marquee writers and a full-fledged identity crisis. Harman—who had taken on what a well-placed source told me was nearly $75 million in liabilities for his $1—needed a turnaround artist.

And there she was, perched next to Diller, legs crossed, a perfect tousle in her blond bob: Tina Brown, the legendary former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Famous for generating “buzz,” Brown had remade the magazine business in the 1980s and 1990s. By 2010, she was editing the Daily Beast, a two-year-old online magazine owned by Diller, which had generated much buzz while losing $10 million a year. Now, they were talking with Harman about a merger of the two money-bleeding properties. It made a certain kind of sense: Newsweek’s print advertising still fetched far more money than online ads, while the Beast presumably had the digital savvy Newsweek lacked, if no business model to speak of.

Already, Brown had met with Harman in the Hamptons to eat quiche and talk shop. She was intrigued by Harman’s merger idea and responded to it with a long letter laying out her vision for Newsweek. By the time they met in Diller’s home, Harman had taken to calling her “princess” and “my beauty.”

“Tina really, really wanted this thing,” says a person with knowledge of the negotiations. “She wanted one last stab at a print magazine.”

Her previous run at a magazine had ended famously in 2002, after she bombed through some $50 million in 2 1/2 years on a doomed monthly called Talk. In 2006, she had tried, and failed, to land the top job at Time. Now, venerable Newsweek represented a chance to restore luster to her career. “I think the business plan was that Tina was going to be fabulous,” says the person familiar with the negotiations. “I literally don’t think there was ever a different plan.”

“Tina really, really wanted this,” says a person with knowledge of the negotiations. “One last stab at a print magazine.”

As a member of the board of the Washington Post Co. when it sold Newsweek to Harman, Diller knew just how much trouble the magazine was in, but he warmed to the idea. Harman would carry more of the losses on his books, and Newsweek, despite an operating loss of nearly $40 million in 2009, was still able to generate $165 million in revenue from advertising and newsstand sales—cash that would conceivably allow Diller to pretty up the Beast’s balance sheet and keep analysts off his back.

At one point, word leaked that Diller was considering such a deal, and Beast staffers were relieved when it looked like the negotiations might fall through. But the conversations promptly resumed. Staffers made jokes about escaping a burning building only to have it chase them down the street.

That burning building was now sitting in Diller’s living room. The group had started in Bemelmans Bar downstairs, where deals are struck over Gershwin and martinis, but Harman couldn’t hear much. So they repaired to Diller’s pad, where Harman launched into his pitch, explaining how he wanted to run Newsweek. He had a vague vision to “connect the dots” and synthesize weekly news. He wanted to play a role.

You have to let Tina be the editor she is, Diller told Harman. Making her into something she’s not simply won’t work.

It was right around this time that Brown, forever in high heels, stood to make her way to the bathroom. As she crossed Diller’s marble floor, she wiped out and smacked her face on the ground, according to a source who was not involved in the negotiations but who knows the Harman family. (“That probably happened,” Brown told me. “I’m always slipping on floors.”)

It was the type of mishap that Brown, weaned on British tabloids, would never omit from a story about the tribulations of the elite. And neither shall we, for no omen is more fitting. Three years later, Brown will have tumbled completely out of journalism, Diller will have lost north of $100 million ($70 million alone of it as a result of the Newsweek merger, he recently told me), and Harman will be dead. The NewsBeast experiment will be ruled a historic failure, perhaps the last great magazine flameout. This is the after-action report.

***

Left: Tina Brown with friend-turned-business-partner Barry Diller at 2006 gala in New York. | Jason Kempin/FILMMAGIC; Center top: Newsweek owner Sidney Harman, who died in 2011. | Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo; Center bottom: Brown with publisher Ron Galotti (left) and movie magnate Harvey Weinstein at the 1999 launch party for Talk magazine | Robin Platzer/Twin Images/Getty; Right: Brown in 1991 with Condé Nast chair Si Newhouse, who installed her at the helm of Vanity Fair and then the New Yorker. | Ron Galella/WireImage

Tina Brown once told a joke about immigrating to America on the Concorde. She told this joke on Liberty Island while wearing a Donna Karan gown and hosting a $500,000 launch party for Talk magazine, a decadent fin-de-siècle bash for Hollywood stars, supermodels and assorted cultural and business titans (among them Barry Diller) who were ferried to the foot of the Statue of Liberty to picnic on blankets under Chinese lanterns.

Brown, a tony Brit from a show-business family, had become the editor of Tatler, a gossipy society monthly, in 1979, at age 25 and not long out of Oxford. She courted England’s upper crust while simultaneously lancing it. The royal family provided endless fodder. In Princess Diana, Brown also found a career lodestone and blueprint for public life: Diana embraced the spotlight but also turned that light onto serious issues.

She arrived in New York in 1983 to consult for and then to edit a newly relaunched version of Vanity Fair, and received from Condé Nast boss Si Newhouse all the perks enjoyed by his editors, including the interest-free loan Brown used to buy a capacious Midtown apartment. Town cars idled outside her office to whisk her to lunch at the Four Seasons. She was 30 years old.

Inside this luxurious glamour bubble, she perfected her signature high-low approach to editing—a mix of serious reportage and Hollywood-driven fluff ginned up from her ever-expanding Rolodex of famous names. The pregnant, naked Demi Moore cover? That was Brown. An interview with Manuel Noriega? Also Brown. She worked long hours and tore up issues at the last second. She spent large sums on writers and photographers. And she turned Vanity Fair into a newsstand hit, lifting sales of the magazine from 100,000 per issue to 1.1 million, she told me. In so doing, she transformed the American magazine business and helped launch a cult of celebrity the world now takes for granted.

When Newhouse put Brown in charge of the stodgy, money-losing New Yorker in 1992, she took the same approach, albeit with less clear-cut success. She fired and then hired dozens, added flash and photos to the grand dame, but never managed to get the magazine out of the red. “Almost the hardest thing I ever did because it was also a jewel, and I couldn’t smash it,” Brown says. By the end of her tenure, the New Yorker was still losing money, around $10 million a year.

In 1999, after finding a new patron in the film mogul Harvey Weinstein, she struck out on her own with Talk, which billed itself as a “reinvention of the upscale general interest magazine”—one that pursued stories that could be optioned by Weinstein’s Miramax Films. For the first time, Brown foundered. She wanted to expand into books, TV and radio. The big budgets and large staffs at Condé Nast had channeled Brown’s mercurial perfectionism. But it was a liability now. Brown incinerated money. She pushed her staff hard, at all hours. “We all had to get these fax machines,” says one of Talk’s founding editors, Sam Sifton, now a senior editor at the New York Times. “You’re a young journalist living in Brooklyn, and at three in the morning this thing starts whirring and buzzing … messages coming out [from Brown] in emotional bleats.”

Weinstein was never as patient as Newhouse. “If you’re talented and you don’t learn the way you should and understand the business side, you should stay with the billionaire with the open pocketbook,” says Katrina Heron, an editor who worked with Brown at Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. “She didn’t. She went to Harvey Weinstein.”

When the Miramax boss shuttered Talk at the start of 2002, Brown took a $1 million contract settlement she dubbed “fuck-off” money. She blamed her failure on the economic downturn following the Sept. 11 attacks and decamped for the Mediterranean with her husband, the British editor Harry Evans, and their two children, for a vacation aboard Diller’s 305-foot schooner. (The two had been friends for years; Brown recalls meeting Diller at his house in Malibu during her Vanity Fair days.) “My reputation rests on four magazines—three great successes, one that was a great experiment,” she told the Telegraph at the time of the Talk shutdown. “I don’t feel in any way down. No big career doesn’t have one flame-out in it, and there’s nobody more boring than the undefeated.”

Mario Ruiz/Time & Life Pictures/Getty; Jeffrey A. Salter/N.Y. Times/Redux; Scott Gries/Getty

In 2004, Brown poked her head back up and started writing a column for the Style section of the Washington Post that trafficked mainly in celebrity and ham-fisted prose. Three years later, however, she produced what might have been her finest piece of writing, a dishy, well-wrought biography of her favorite subject, Princess Diana, which reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

Come 2008, Brown was up for a new challenge. Diller had an idea for an online media startup, an aggregated news site with magazine flair. He had first approached Brown about it in 2006, while she was writing her book, and she had demurred. Now she was ready.

***

The Daily Beast launched without a drumroll on Oct. 6, 2008. It was clean and artful, named after the fictional Fleet Street newspaper in Brown’s favorite novel, Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh, father of one of her London contemporaries. An editorial staff of a dozen worked out of IAC headquarters in Chelsea, a beautiful deconstructivist hive whose occupants had access to endless snacks and Wii game consoles. Brown’s experience with the web was nonexistent, but she had Diller’s confidence and checkbook.

Tina Brown with NewsBeast CEO Stephen Colvin. | Ruth Fremson/New York Times/Redux

Diller had faith in his glitzy editor, who had persuaded him to invest in more than the smart aggregation (top stories from around the web and the like) he had originally envisioned. “We workshopped the idea for about six months,” Diller told me recently. “And then we decided let’s go heavy on original content.” Brown had the lesson of her last launch in mind. “We just kind of put it up on the web,” says a former Beast employee. “[Tina] was conscious of that and wanted to be different. She was talking ‘this thing is going to be lean and mean and stripped down.’”

Brown, at first anyway, seemed willing to curb her prodigal ways. The low-key launch party took place in a small burger joint that ran out of mini-hamburgers by 8:15 p.m. She had equity in the business and had taken a paltry-for-her salary between $400,000 and $500,000, though it was still a vast sum for an online journalism startup and bound to rise, up to at least $750,000.

Still, Brown started out saying many of the right things. In her debut editor’s letter, she made a crack about how not even she could spend money fast enough to bust Barry Diller. She seemed newly aware of the attenuated fortunes of her industry. Yet here she was, running a spanking new Internet venture without really having entered the Internet era herself. Staffers remember hearing AOL’s antiquated “you’ve got mail” chime echoing from her office. Each day, someone printed out the Beast’s stories and hand-delivered them to Brown. When she was traveling, the stories were faxed. “People talk about her Rolodex,” an IAC insider says. “Unfortunately, it probably is a Rolodex.”

Brown trained up on a BlackBerry, a device that enabled her obsessive tendencies. She was a workaholic—energy is one of her gifts, so is curiosity—and began barraging employees with messages at all hours. One morning at 1:20 a.m., a query winged in from Jaipur, where Brown was attending a literary festival: “Can u tell me exactly where Bhutan is ?” Other emails, like her faxes of yesteryear, were often worded in an indecipherable patois that Beast employees called “Chinese Tina.” One example: “Barnacle is a plank.”

The launch was hectic: Brown was always in crisis mode, always rushed, always ravenous for scoops. Her desire lacked direction, but it produced results—as did her Rolodex. The first week in, conservative columnist Christopher Buckley caused a splash on the site by announcing his support for Barack Obama’s candidacy. Leaning on Brown’s sources, the Beast was all over the phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. When Bernie Madoff hit the news, the editor’s fabled spidey sense for the zeitgeist hummed. “‘This is going to be big, guys. This is going to be huge,’” a former staffer remembers her announcing. “She was just all over it and was assigning things that night.”

She was acting like a magazine editor.

Brown’s slick sensibility elevated the Beast above most online fare, including the site of her longtime frenemy, Arianna Huffington, but she couldn’t compete with the Huffington Post’s massive audience and burgeoning revenue. Huffington and her co-founders had realized early that the Internet is more low-low than high-low, something Brown, a lifelong salon mistress, never appeared to grasp. Huffington was well on her way to more than 25 million unique visitors a month—and to selling Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million off an initial investment of $5 million. Brown, meanwhile, was struggling to demonstrate what she wanted the Beast to do and be.

When a Hollywood news site published a recording of Mel Gibson acting crazy, Brown was furious the Beast missed out on the scoop. “The reaction in the [editorial] meeting was, ‘We were supposed to be getting the Mel Gibson tapes?’” says one former Beast employee. “If you’re Politico, you know what you’re going to do. If you’re Slate, you know. We were all over the waterfront.”

Then there was the matter of the money. The Beast had launched without a formal business plan, which wasn’t uncommon for a lot of tech startups. While it has been reported that Diller plunked down $18 million to finance the operation for its first two years, former employees say the billionaire never set such a hard-and-fast budget and seemed willing to spend freely. “A business plan is a silly exercise in making things up,” Diller explained to me. “I think it’s foolish in new ventures when you have no revenue and you only have expenses. Revenue is going to take a long time to develop.”

“A business plan is a silly exercise in making things up,” Barry Diller says. The Beast didn’t have one.

But it meant the site launched with no ads and no sales team—only a plan to put such things into place over the coming year. The brass freely admitted they were winging it. “There’s an inevitable moment where all these places hire a HuffPo refugee to help them understand the Internet,” says a former staffer. “That never happened.”

Brown’s senior editorial staff wasn’t stocked with web natives either. Her first hire, executive editor Edward Felsenthal, a former deputy managing editor at the Wall Street Journal, had more recently been a consultant at Condé Nast’s Portfolio magazine, which closed in 2009, having lost $100 million over two years in a debacle that eclipsed even Brown’s Talk shutdown. (After Portfolio died, Brown contracted the magazine’s editor, Joanne Lipman, to write a column.)

By October 2010, the Beast had 5 million unique monthly visitors, according to Quantcast, and it seemed clear that Brown was trying to do what she had always done: create a glossy, spendthrift print magazine. In public, Diller called Brown a “pitch-perfect editor who knew exactly what she was doing.”

Then Sidney Harman happened along.

***

Synergy is a dumb word people use when they want to sound smart about business. After the November 2010 merger of Newsweek and the Daily Beast, the IAC building was lousy with synergy. Harman had consented to Diller’s request to unleash Brown. She would report to an editorial board led by the two owners.

In the glass-walled IAC office where she welcomed guests with tea served in fancy china, Brown was ecstatic. She was back in magazines. “I read somewhere that she didn’t want to do [the merger],” says one former staffer. “That’s 100 percent false. … She was as excited as I’ve ever seen her. Of all the things I’m sure about, it’s that.”

Brown addressed the Beasties first, ducking questions about the wisdom of the merger. Later, she went to the Newsweek office, a dingy temporary space in the financial district’s Hanover Square. Brown referred to the office, which had windows so filthy they warped light, as “the lives of others,” after the 2006 Oscar-winning German film about spies in East Berlin. “She thought it had a Stasi feel to it,” one former Newsweek writer says. “And it did.”

When it merged with Newsweek in 2010, the Daily Beast was losing $10 million a year. | Ruth Fremson/New York Times/Redux

When the magazine’s circulation and advertising numbers had started to plummet, Jon Meacham, Newsweek’s previous editor, and the business team had tried to correct the nosedive by embarking on a five-year plan to reinvent the publication as an ideas and opinion journal for a smaller, upscale audience. This experiment, which the Washington Post Co. tolerated for less than two years, had been a colossal misfire.

Now, the mood at the magazine was excitement mixed with dread. Brown’s reputation as a brilliant editor gave hope to the remaining staff, which numbered about 150. But they were also intimidated and fearful for jobs they had clung to during months of upheaval. When she arrived, Brown walked from cubicle to cubicle, greeting journalists individually. She had read their stories. She knew their names. She clearly cared. It was the sort of gesture that has endeared her to many writers over the years. “Everyone was nervously trying to figure out a way to impress her in the 30 seconds you got,” says a former Newsweek writer.

Optimism ran high among the top editors. There was talk of doing the deep narrative journalism Brown loved. There was talk of infusing Newsweek with new voices from the Beast and populating the Beast with content that couldn’t find its way into the magazine, which, of course, had its own website, one of its last healthy assets in terms of traffic and advertising.

She dug into the magazine, prepping for a redesign and relaunch, scooping up notable writers and designers. She would spend on talent, home in on the high-low and chase scoops, buzz and celebrity. It had worked before. Beyond that, though, exactly what she wanted was unclear.

Lindsay Ballant, who later succeeded Dirk Barnett as the head of Newsweek’s art department, once got to talking to Barnett about Brown’s mission for the magazine. “I asked him one night, ‘Did you get, like, a grand vision for what she wants? Did you get a quick elevator pitch for what she wants it to be? … Like, Vanity Fair meets this or that?’ And he said, ‘Come to think of it, no.’” Ballant was stunned. “That framed my entire experience. There’s actually no grand vision for this.”

In March 2011, the new Newsweek hit the stands with Hillary Clinton on the cover. Like most of Brown’s debuts, the relaunch was a success. Newsstand sales were up 19 percent from the magazine’s average in 2010, the publication’s most dismal year in recent memory. The number of ad pages would soon rise 14 percent.

In April, Brown’s next signing debuted. It was a big one. Andrew Sullivan, editor of the enormously popular Daily Dish blog at the Atlantic, had agreed to port his operation to the Beast. The plan was that Sullivan’s more than 1 million faithful readers would follow him, goosing the Daily Beast’s traffic and providing the site with a prominent, if pricey, new voice. The budget for Sullivan’s blog was about $800,000, a figure that—according to emails between Brown and Sullivan that I obtained—included $250,000 earmarked for several Daily Dish staffers. “Whatever the cost in terms of content, he made back in terms of revenue,” says Deidre Depke, another experienced Newsweek hand later returned to the fold by Brown. Maybe the turnaround artist could pull it off after all.

But a few days after Sullivan’s debut, Harman died unexpectedly from acute myeloid leukemia. The news was jarring. Although he was 92, Harman was thought to have been in good health, and he had a passion for Newsweek that Diller never shared. “The wrong billionaire died,” recent NewsBeast hire Peter Boyer would joke morbidly. Harman had promised to spend $40 million over three years to save the magazine. But nobody knew for how long the Harman family would remain committed. Or how Diller might respond.

“Sidney Harman bought himself a corpse,” Michael Wolff, the Vanity Fair media columnist, says. “Barry inherited a corpse.”

***

Under pressure to produce, Brown fell back on her old magazine tricks. In late June 2011, the deceased Princess Diana made a cover appearance in Brown’s redone Newsweek. But not just any Diana. Brown chose to reanimate the princess, wrinkle her face and depict her walking down a present-day street with Kate Middleton. “Zombie Diana,” the staff called it. Inside the magazine, the princess was given an iPhone. She had a Facebook page. “I wanted to make her a time traveler,” Brown said at the time. Who was to question such outlandishness? This was Tina Brown.

“We all knew going in she had this reputation of being obnoxious and difficult to work with but that she’s brilliant like Steve Jobs,” says one former Newsweek editor. “What we realized is that she wasn’t brilliant. She was actually pretty bad. That was the shocking thing. There was really no hand on the tiller.”

Zombie Diana was more than just a publicity headache. Two business sources from Newsweek say that after the cover appeared, Apple wasn’t pleased to see its iPhone in the paws of a dead princess, and a major Apple ad buy, which one of the sources said amounted to close to $500,000, did not materialize. Brown spokesperson Andrew Kirk said there was no explicit connection between any Brown editorial decision and any major loss of business. “Had a $500,000 cancellation happened, Tina would surely have known about it—which is not the case,” he wrote me. The bad publicity continued. Brown had become a politics junkie—a well-timed interest in advance of the 2012 presidential election. For a cover of Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, Brown chose a photo of the Tea Party queen that looked like a Charles Manson mug shot and that now appears on the first page of image results when one googles “crazy eyes.” Senior editors pushed back. Brown overruled them. In fact, she wanted to find a photo that made Bachmann look even crazier, according to several sources. It didn’t exist.

For all the buzz-chasing, other key stats were lagging. The already tepid print subscription numbers dropped another 8 percent over the first half of 2011. Each time a reader called Newsweek’s toll-free number to cancel a subscription or complain, it cost the publication $2, according to a former NewsBeast executive, who claims the bill over two months in the summer of 2011 amounted to at least $3 million. And there were still precious few ads on the Beast website. Newsweek still cost $42 million to simply produce every year—a fortune that didn’t include hiring writers or photographers. By 2011, the combined NewsBeast was hemorrhaging more than $40 million a year.

Despite the losses, the magazine was being talked about. That summer, it scored a coup when it published an exclusive interview with the maid who had accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the recently departed head of the International Monetary Fund and presumptive candidate for the French presidency, of rape. Some covers were timely and creative—and no one doubted Brown’s desire to understand and explain the world.

“For all the knocks on her for chasing the zeitgeist, she often got most excited about pieces without a sexy hook, like suicide or deep-sea diving or the complicated racial dynamics of the old South,” says Tony Dokoupil, one of Newsweek’s young writers. Brown could be supportive, firing off congratulatory “Tinagrams” to writers to let them know she was happy with their work. She gave her writers a long leash to report and ample resources to pursue stories. Many of them loved her.

“Sometimes a kind of a weariness sets in with newsmagazine editors where you feel like you’ve seen it all, you’ve heard it all, there’s nothing new under the sun,” says Daniel Klaidman, a longtime Newsweek editor. “But Tina had a really infectious enthusiasm. … She would get really excited. I think it was genuine.”

Others came to think that Brown’s fickle management style—hardly unique among top editors—was leading to troubling inefficiencies at a publication that could barely afford to buy ink. Staffers would get roped into ad hoc meetings where Brown would say things like, “I feel like Chicago is really hot right now. What can we do about Chicago?” In just such a meeting, she ordered up a package on the Windy City, hoping to cover Obama and Groupon and anything else zeitgeisty there. Young journalists struggled to divine meaning from Brown’s oracular pronouncements and would be dispatched to write stories that would often get killed for lack of focus or buzz. Early in Brown’s career, when she was surrounded by a stable of seasoned editors and writers who could help focus her truffle hunts, this came off as savant behavior. Not anymore.

“We would be so frustrated,” one young former staffer told me, “because she would literally spend half of our annual salaries on these pieces that would not run at all. It was very disheartening.”

Still, Brown kept dipping into her Rolodex of pricey names. She paid Salman Rushdie $10,000 to burp out 866 words about Osama bin Laden and Pakistan for a special issue after bin Laden was killed. The magazine’s cover shoots also cost a pretty penny. Brown would dictate what she wanted—for example, a woman climbing a ladder in a power suit in heels with a pencil skirt—and if one detail nonplussed her, she would throw out everything. One cover shoot involved setting Charlie Sheen on fire and cost about $20,000—it never resulted in a cover.

But the Boyer-Biden boondoggle may have been the most aggravating. Peter Boyer, a veteran reporter Brown had lured away from the New Yorker, was dispatched to Tokyo at the behest of John Solomon, another new Brown hire who had been the editor of the Washington Times. Boyer was under the impression that Solomon, the news and investigations editor, had arranged for an interview for Boyer with Vice President Joe Biden. But before Boyer got to the airport, it became clear to him that the interview was anything but certain. Boyer begged off in emails to Brown, who was on Diller’s yacht in the Bahamas. “You don’t bump into the vice president of the United States on the streets of Tokyo in a pachinko palace and say, ‘Joe, let’s talk a little,’” Boyer says now.

Brown still thought he should go. She had always liked to gamble. “I think it’s worth it,” she told him. “I very much doubt [Biden] can be restrained from talking.” And so Boyer went, legging across the Far East for days with the Biden entourage only to be told, late one night aboard Air Force Two bound for Hawaii, that Biden was feeling unwell and, more to the point, was asleep in the front of the plane and unavailable for an interview.

“One of the most frustrating experiences of my life,” Boyer says now. “I was plenty sore.” Needless to say, no Biden story ever ran. Solomon says the trip cost $10,000 and that the magazine always intended to send a reporter, interview or not. “We were doing the trip anyway,” he says. “If the vice president didn’t get sick, we would probably have gotten the interview.”

But Brown was racking up other bills, too. She launched an ambitious TV effort, building a studio in the NewsBeast offices. She threw dozens of occasionally lavish book parties at her home. More than a few were treated as work expenses, according to several sources. She would jet off to events like the Jaipur Literature Festival with several assistants.

“I want a woman giving a blow job to pasta,” she said. The pasta got switched out for a stock photo of asparagus.

Her top editors were powerless to help right the magazine’s course, and stress levels among NewsBeast upper management spiked to a point that people—even now, three years removed—describe the experience with terms like “PTSD” and “out-of-body experience.” One person told me, “She made The Devil Wears Prada look sane.” Tom Weber, the managing editor who had come over from the Wall Street Journal, groused to one colleague in those days that he felt like a brake pad: You can put in a new one, but after a while it gets so worn down, you have to toss it. Everyone felt it. Diller had even taken to barking criticism at Brown in meetings.

It all came to a boil on what former staffers now call Bloody Monday.

***

Here’s how Regis Philbin killed Newsweek for Tina Brown: Boyer was toiling away with his editor, Katrina Heron, on a reported article related to Peter Schweizer’s book about insider trading in Congress. Slated for a November cover, Boyer’s piece was a serious bit of journalism that had been a brutal jag of shuffles, rewrites and wrangling. On the Friday the magazine closed, Boyer learned from Heron that Brown, unhappy with the art for the piece, had decided to bump their story from the cover in favor of Regis Philbin (mugging with Jerry Seinfeld).

“You’re joking,” Boyer said to Heron.

She wasn’t.

“You’ve got to be joking.”

She wasn’t.

“Fuck it!” Boyer said. “Just fuck it!”

With only a soupçon of sarcasm, Heron now calls the event a “dark moment in my life and the annals of journalism.” Numerous sources interviewed for this article point to the Regis cover as the moment when their last drop of faith in Brown evaporated. Boyer, who despite the disagreement says he remains a staunch fan of Brown, didn’t care about the cover—he cared about the decision to chase stale buzz. Newsweek looked like an airline magazine. From the 1990s.

“It was shocking that someone who ran a website that was entirely built around this idea that she would capture the zeitgeist and thought she knew what was hot would put Regis Philbin and Jerry Seinfeld on the cover,” says another former Newsweek writer. “It was insane.”

When Brown heard about the uproar, she says, she called the office and laced into Weber for not giving Boyer a heads-up. “Tom, why the fuck didn’t you call Peter Boyer?” she shouted. But Weber had had enough. He had been telling Brown for weeks that he might not be the best fit for the direction the magazine was heading. Now he told her he was done. Over the weekend, Weber packed up his office. The next Monday—Bloody Monday—he met Brown for breakfast near the office to officially resign. The meeting was cordial, but Brown had to dash off. In what was perhaps an accidental moment of frugality, she stuck Weber with the bill.

Coincidentally, that same day, Newsweek’s publisher was sacked. More ominously, Edward Felsenthal, Brown’s consigliere from the start, quit. His officewide resignation email hit like an IED. “It just completely blindsided everyone. Groups of people were huddled. It was like a car accident scene,” says a former NewsBeast staffer. “I also remember Edward being very happy. He came out of his office. … He had his hands in the air. He was smiling.”

“I had a blast working with Tina and building the Beast,” Felsenthal tells me now. “Newsweek was an alternate universe for all of us.”

For help, Brown turned to Mark Miller, who had been at Newsweek for years prior to the Harman purchase, and a new executive editor, Justine Rosenthal. Both had a calming influence on the newsroom heading into 2012. But the editorial blunders continued in the months ahead, from an error-riddled Niall Ferguson story about President Obama that misconstrued all manner of economic data to a “food porn” cover shot for a piece about the world’s best restaurants. “I want a woman giving a blow job to pasta,” Brown told her art department at the time. The pasta later got switched out for a stock photo of asparagus.

“A dichotomy of overthinking and not thinking something through,” is how Ballant, the former art director, puts it.

***

In July 2012, not long after Brown ran a cover of Obama portraying him as a gay president, the Harman family, which had still been supporting Newsweek financially, announced it had capped its investment and would reduce its ownership stake in the joint venture to below 30 percent.

Sidney Harman’s widow, Jane, a former California congresswoman, told me the Harman family “fulfilled all of [Sidney’s] commitments after his death.” Those commitments, a former Newsweek employee told me, likely amounted to $40 million.

When I asked Jane Harman recently if the content of the magazine had anything to do with the Harman family’s decision, Harman replied, “Tina had editorial control.” When asked if tasteless covers had anything to do with the Harman family decision, Harman replied again, “Tina had editorial control.” When asked if Jane Harman, personally, has any opinion at all about covers like crazy-eyes Bachmann or zombie Diana, Harman replied a third time, a bit more adamantly, “Tina had editorial control!”

Regardless, it was a death knell. Two days later, Diller told analysts on an earnings call that Newsweek would likely stop print publication and go digital. Brown, at the time, was on a flight to Aspen for an event at one of Harman’s homes. She learned about Diller’s announcement by reading the news scroll on her seat-back TV. “I couldn’t yet turn on my phone,” Brown told me. “I thought, ‘What the hell has happened here?’ That wasn’t great. … Once said, it could not be unsaid. It was painful for everybody.”

When Brown got off the plane, she phoned her old friend. “There was a call from Tina, and she was rightly upset,” Diller remembers. “I apologized about the timing and not being able to give her any forewarning. Reality descended on both of us.”

In October 2012, Newsweek announced it would stop printing by the end of the year. | David Chang/EPA/Corbis

What followed in 2013 was a spasm of buck-passing, spin and staff turnover as Newsweek limped into its ill-fated digital future. In September 2013, BuzzFeed broke the news that Diller would not be renewing Brown’s contract for the coming year. Brown—who says she resigned on June 8 but kept it quiet out of loyalty to Diller while he decided whether to fold, sell or keep the Beast—had been scooped by a booming Internet publication and a former Beast media reporter with whom she had clashed, Peter Lauria. What’s more, she was sure he was leaked the information by someone within IAC. To Brown, the queen of buzz, the leak felt like a nasty betrayal.

Before Brown left, Diller gave her control of the Women in the World summit, an annual conference series she had launched in 2010 to bring activists, celebrities and thought leaders together to call attention to women’s “successes and travails.” Like the many events businesses that media companies (including Politico) have created to convene conferences, it was a for-profit affair, one owned by the Daily Beast and, later, the Newsweek Daily Beast Co. (Brown also created, in 2011, a separate charitable arm called the Women in the World Foundation to dispense grants). Despite her myriad editorial responsibilities, programming for the Women in the World summit became a big priority for Brown and her staff. “Your whole life would kind of come to a stop when that conference would happen,” says a former Beast staffer.

Brown was on a plane when Diller announced Newsweek would stop printing. She got the news on her seat-back TV.

In August 2013, just prior to her departure from NewsBeast, Brown began quietly planning her next act. She incorporated Women in the World Media, her own for-profit venture that would continue to stage the annual summit. She also registered Tina Brown Live Media, another for-profit enterprise. It was a crafty move that augured her post-journalism plans. She was getting into the live events business.

A month after Brown left Newsweek, Diller transferred the remnants of the magazine to IBT Media, publisher of the International Business Times and several websites, which had purchased Newsweek from Diller over the summer. Although IBT was a digital company, Newsweek’s incoming editor, Jim Impoco, declared his intention to return the magazine to newsstands in early 2014. And he would.

The debut March issue featured a cover story that purported to unmask the creator of the mysterious cryptocurrency Bitcoin. It generated as much buzz as any piece during Brown’s Newsweek regime, but for all the wrong reasons. The man identified by the magazine denied any involvement with Bitcoin. Newsweek was seemingly besmirched afresh. The media howled.

As for the Daily Beast, Diller decided, after a few jittery days in September 2013, that his online magazine would live on into 2014, bubbling along at 13 million monthly uniques, according to Quantcast. (Internal numbers are about 17 million monthly uniques, according to Diller.) The Beast today is not a really big site, though it is reaching a larger audience than when Brown edited it (editors say it has had record traffic highs in the first part of 2014 and that unique visitors are up 30 percent year to date). Still, it is not the same as it was. The content is weaker and more sensational, a little closer to low-low than high-low. On one recent April afternoon, the home page featured stories on a “cat cafe craze sweeping the globe,” the Vatican bank, the Oscar Pistorius murder trial and Rand Paul. The editor-in-chief is John Avlon, a political columnist, CNN analyst and former Rudy Giuliani speechwriter who bumped his way up the editorial ladder as other staffers left.

***

Tina Brown sits down next to me in a booth in the dining room at the boutique Royalton Hotel in midtown Manhattan, favorite lunch boîte of Condé Nasters past. Beneath a black blazer, she is wearing a white shirt, unbuttoned just so; her blond bob features, yes, a perfect tousle. She locks her hooded blue eyes on me, orders a sparkling water and begins her defense by asking me why Politico Magazine would want to run a story about her, a story Brown deems “old potatoes.”

“Everybody knows what that story was,” she tells me. “The story was it was an unsavable magazine that we had a quixotic stab at saving. It couldn’t be saved, and we moved on. Basta. I mean, there’s nothing else to say, really.”

But there is more to say, and here she is to say it—here to muster a defense, willing to talk to me two days after her Women in the World summit, a three-day conference that has left her exhausted. As they say in the fight business, she’s game. And that, alone, is worthy of respect.

So is some of the journalism the Daily Beast and Newsweek produced under her, Brown says, including, among other examples, Christopher Dickey’s “world scoop” about the DSK maid. She defends sending Boyer overseas, saying she assigned only two foreign trips that didn’t pan out. She says she lacked, for the most part, a calm, strong team around her who could channel her and, yes, stand up to her. Her happiest moments, she says, were with the Beast.

“We built a news brand very, very quickly that was very well respected and read in Washington and New York, L.A., read in the opinion-forming corridors. … I had a budget I had to operate in,” she tells me. “Whatever it was, I lived in it. It wasn’t much. We only had about 40 people [at the Beast]. We did a lot with that money. … There were stories that we owned.”

Did they build a viable new media business out of the Beast? Brown admits they didn’t but says that wasn’t her mandate. “We didn’t even have a business part in the beginning. Barry wanted it to be just editorial until we got an audience,” she reminds me. “I would say on the digital innovation front it was not as good as it should have been. … But again, I wasn’t running the business.”

Diller agrees over the phone later. “Tina is an editor. She’s not responsible for business decisions. She’s an editor, and I think she did a good job.” Diller says it’s a shame that the Newsweek collapse has erased memory of the Beast’s momentum—that the cratering of the old magazine has been pinned on Brown. “I don’t believe it was her fault. But she’s Tina Brown, and when there’s going to be a failure like Newsweek, it’ll be at her feet. Let me say this: There’s nobody I could even imagine or conceive of who could save Newsweek. It simply was an irrelevant audience to an advertiser. I take far more responsibility for this than Tina. If we had done our job correctly, we never would have done Newsweek. … It was a mistake filled with groundless hope that came from everybody, including me.”

Yet multiple former colleagues say Brown, who was deeply involved in trying to land advertisers, held considerable sway over the business side, first informally and, later, formally. After the departure of NewsBeast CEO Stephen Colvin, who had reported to Diller, a new CEO, Baba Shetty, came in and reported to both Brown and Diller, he confirmed to me.

“[B]eware of testimonies of pale stale males (or PSMs as my daughter likes to call them)!” Brown would write to me later, referring to those she thought might portray her as reckless. In the past, she has often intimated that misogyny might motivate her critics. But the response I had received from the males—pale, stale or otherwise—was one of near-unanimous agreement: They questioned many of Brown’s decisions but recognized that returning Newsweek to health was likely an impossible mission.

#WitW14 green room w/ #PussyRiot & Hillary! pic.twitter.com/i1D3odCdBM — Tina Brown (@TinaBrownLM) April 4, 2014 Tna Brown with Hillary Clinton and two members of Pussy Riot at the Women in the World summit in New York in April.

Back at the Royalton, Brown and I talked about what it felt like to try to save the unsaveable: “You know, you try it. You try taking over a magazine that was already dead, that was losing a fortune, that had an intractable union as well, so you were carrying 80 people who you couldn’t even replace, where you didn’t have any management left. At one point, I was having to be the editor, the managing editor and the executive editor. I mean, it was agony. … It was why I was in hotel rooms at midnight in Europe writing captions. I was correcting captions. I was spotting errors. … My husband and I would be sitting there closing Newsweek.”

I asked her about being a female editor and whether she feels she was treated differently. “I’m fierce when I’m passionate. I don’t feel like I’m some dragon lady. … I am mercurial, but the notion that I am this callous chaos machine is utterly unfair. The emotional frantic woman, instead of the hard-charging man. Ask Jann Wenner if he tears up magazines, Clay Felker in his great heyday tearing up magazines, Ed Kosner when he was at Newsweek. I mean, any news editor tears up things. My husband used to remake the Sunday Times like 13 times before it went to press, and there were always some people in the pub afterwards going, ‘Fuck him.’ … But he didn’t lose any sleep. That’s the difference.”

“You try taking over a magazine that was already dead,” Brown says. “I mean, it was agony.”

Indeed, Brown’s friends agree that she worried about her staff more than she is given credit for; they say she’s extremely loyal, and even those with whom she has clashed tend to remain in her orbit. Critics and even her former underlings are wistful for the Newsweek of yore, one that she says she was powerless to resurrect. “It was really an insane notion to try to save it, but we did try,” she says. “You can’t fight against the zeitgeist.”

She is no longer trying. Brown, now 60, is back to riding the zeitgeist. On stage at her Women in the World summit at Lincoln Center two days earlier, she had interviewed Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, about diplomacy and motherhood. Soft-spoken and nervous in front of crowds—“I don’t like speaking in public,” she says, “I’m not a natural performer”—Brown gives a polished interview. The theater, with seats for 2,586 people, was nearly full. Lit in blue and deep pink, with graphics swirling on an enormous flat screen, the setting had the feel of a high-minded European talk show.

Big sponsors such as Toyota, Bank of America, AT&T and Coca-Cola had signed on to support the summit. And big names appeared, people like Hillary Clinton and Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the IMF. Meryl Streep was a co-host. Queen Rania of Jordan stopped by, as did Rashida Jones, Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart and Jimmy Carter. Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Susan Collins sat on a panel titled “Can Women Fix Washington?” Outside on the sidewalk, I spotted Pussy Riot hacking butts. It was a mega-conclave of the high-low. It was a testament to the power of Brown’s Rolodex. Barry Diller even showed up. He and Brown remain close. Over Christmas, she vacationed at the Harbour Island home owned by Diller’s wife, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, in the Bahamas.

The summit, Brown’s brainchild and the main focus for both her boundless energy and her for-profit conference business, has become “the most important thing” she has ever done, Brown says in our interview. She likes to refer to her new events business as “theatrical journalism.” She insists she still creates and edits content.

“It is a magazine,” Brown tells me.

What else would it be?

As Brown gets up to leave, she offers to pay the $7 bill for our sparkling water. I stop her. “I’m sure worse things have been written about me,” she tells me, before shuffling into the darkness of the Royalton’s lobby.