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Wales Online
5 hours ago
- Sport
- Wales Online
Nigel Owens: My true feelings on the bunker system and why rugby needs to get serious
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info Those who will be watching the Lions this summer will have probably watched the game on Friday. I think some perhaps didn't know how good a side Argentina are, and how they've come along in the last 10 or 15 years. They really are a great, well-coached side now that have beaten some of the very best in the world. So I wouldn't be reading too much into the result, as disappointing as it may have been, but the performance from the Lions was clearly a little bit rusty, and they've got a few weeks now to ramp up that first Test and get the combinations right. At the moment there's a lot of talk about performances of different players. Captain Maro Itjoe probably wasn't at his usual best on the day. As a player, I'd compare Itoje to a sort of Alun Wyn Jones-type. Of all those games he had for Wales, apart from maybe his final season, he was always consistent. Always a top performer and you'd very rarely hear, if ever actually, any comments about a below-par performance from him after a game. He will go down in my view as our greatest second row. For me, Itoje is right up there with him, with the likes of your Paul O'Connells and your Martin Johnsons. Always consistent. Very, very rarely did you hear people having a go at them for having an off day. But by his own standards last week, Itoje wasn't at his best, and it's probably the first time I've heard people talking about a below-par performance from him. As the captain as well, hopefully it was a one-off and I'm sure he'll be back to his best and being the leader we all know he can be during the Tests. You need your skipper to be your talisman and I'm sure he'll get back to that against an Australian side that I think will surprise a few people. They're a talented team and they've got one of the shrewdest and most consistent top coaches in Joe Schmidt as well. In terms of other performances, another that's a bit of a Marmite player with people is Henry Pollock. There's no doubting he's a quality player, but he brings a sort of showmanship to it. Sign up to Inside Welsh rugby on Substack to get exclusive news stories and insight from behind the scenes in Welsh rugby. Now, there's nothing wrong with that. It that's what makes you perform then great. But you've got to perform, because once you have an off day, everyone wanting to have a go for that showmanship will jump on that wagon. In terms of the Welsh boys, Tomos Williams came on and did well, while Jac Morgan did decent enough, although no doubt more to come from him. It's great, though, that we were all talking about the game and how good Argentina were, rather than talking about the refereeing. For what's worth, though, I thought James Doleman did a good job. Let's just hope that it will be the same during this tour because it will be those three Tests that will matter. Looking back to that first Test win over South Africa last time around, so much of the talk was about the refereeing and Rassie Erasmus' comments as well, which left a bit of a sour taste from an officiating point of view for the whole series. That's not what we want in the game. As a referee, you just want to get on with it and ensure people are talking about a great game and not about you. That's the sign you've done your job. For this series, there's Andrea Piardi, who did the URC final and did a pretty good job, to be fair to him. Then there's the Georgian referee Nika Amashukeli, and obviously Ben O'Keefe. Three quality referees with plenty of experience overall - and they'll need it because the Lions is the same as the World Cup and Six Nations. When you referee the summer Tests or the Autumn Internationals, no one takes much notice of the officiating. If you make a mistake or have a below-par performance, not much of a fuss is made about it. But if you're in something like the Lions when the whole world is watching, you're scrutinised 10 times as much. So there's a huge amount of pressure on you as a referee when you go into these games. For me, the referees just need to go out there and get it right when it matters. Get the big decisions bang on. Don't worry about the 50-50s, let the game flow. I just hope at the end of the summer, all the talk is about a great series of rugby and not any controversies during it. There's no doubt there will be some talking points, but I just hope it's minimal and we don't have a repeat of what happened after the first Test in South Africa, which doesn't do anybody any good, certainly not the game of rugby. Of course, there's always something that brings about a big debate or something in the office on a Monday morning. Whether it be a try, a particular performance or indeed a refereeing decision. One of the incidents that has been dissected this week has been Immanuel Feyi-Waboso's red card for England against France. I've said in the past that I'm not a big fan of the bunker. I just think that if something's a red card, you'll know it's a red card and you should be down to 14 men for the rest of the game, not 20 minutes. It just feels like the referee doesn't make the decision any more. It's given to someone in the bunker, who on most occasions haven't been anywhere near the field of an international game as a referee, and then he's got to make a decision on what could be a defining moment. Experience and ability is crucial for these big moments and that should be down to the referee on the day. I feel the referee is there because he's the best person to do that job and he should be making that decision. If I was refereeing and I wanted to decide if something was a yellow or a red, I'd be wanting to make that decision myself. I wouldn't want to pass that decision on to someone else. It naturally becomes a talking point then. But for all the noise there's only one person to really blame - and that's the player. You can't go in like that and make a tackle around someone's head or neck. There's no debate about that. Players need to learn or change that behaviour to avoid making those tackles. If players change their behaviour and tackle down lower, then we wouldn't be having these discussions about officiating or the bunker. I don't think the bunker has really prevented players from going in and committing those reckless tackles, either, and ultimately that's what we want. If you want to be serious about it, then a red card should also mean a red card and. In my view, I still think the bans for players should be longer too. It shouldn't be reduced because someone says sorry, or because they agree to a tackling school with probably the same coach that was teaching them how to tackle before. If we want to be serious about it, a six-week ban should be a six-week ban.
Daily Mirror
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
I read every day — these are 10 of the best books I would recommend to anyone
There's no feeling quite like sitting down after a long day and diving into a good book. But with countless reads to choose from, finishing one book and selecting another isn't always as easy as it sounds. While I do try to make time for the classics, as well as books published in previous years, I do always find myself gravitating towards the new releases, eager to find a new favourite I know I'll return to again and again in the future. If you're in need of some inspiration for your summer reading list, here are 10 of my absolute top reads of 2025 so far, with picks across all kinds of different genres. For more book recommendations, reviews and news, click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter, The Bookish Drop, on Substack. It's officially Love Island season, with both the UK and US versions airing right now. While I don't religiously watch dating shows anymore, I still gravitate towards any fiction inspired by or based on the world of reality TV. The Compound sees 20 contestants trapped in a remote desert compound and filmed 24/7 as they compete for luxury prizes and basic necessities - while also trying to find love. I don't want to give anything away, but this is a brilliant debut, with some unexpected twists, a simmering uneasiness and an ending I've thought about since I finished reading it. It's out on July 3, and I'd definitely recommend adding it to your summer reading list! Some books need to be read in one sitting, and Make Me Famous is one of them. The book revolves around Cléo, an aspiring singer who is obsessed with becoming famous. We see her rise to fame, as well as her present day, where she jets off on holiday to a remote island to focus on writing her fourth album in peace. Cléo is one of the most dislikeable protagonists I've ever read, which can sometimes be a recipe for disaster, but not in this case. The book is so immersive, so addictive and so twisted. Bonus points for an ending that literally made me gasp aloud. You know a book is good when it's over 500 pages long but you get through it in a matter of days. Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil tells the story of María, Charlotte and Alice, three very different women from very different worlds. V. E. Schwab's signature atmospheric, lyrical writing style transports you across the centuries, with a perfect mixture of obsession, yearning and Sapphic love. It's another addictive read, and once it sinks its teeth into you, you won't be able to put it down. Park Avenue follows Jia Song, a junior partner at a prestigious law firm who takes on a hush-hush case working for one of the most famous Korean families in the world. As Jia travels the world finding answers, contending with feuding siblings and uncovering dark secrets, she finds herself starting to fall for the family. When I saw Park Avenue described as 'Crazy Rich Asians meets Succession', I knew it had the potential to be a five-star read for me. I was hooked all the way through; it's so messy and brings has elements of mystery, romance and thriller. It's also a perfect travel read. I read this while on a weekend away and felt like I was watching a (very entertaining) film in my head the whole time! Sometimes you know before reading that you're going to love a book. But other times, a book you weren't so sure about just blows you away. I am someone who tends to steer clear of anything even remotely scary, so Make a Home of Me by Vanessa Santos has been one of the biggest revelations of the year for me. This collection of short stories, all set in houses that should provide protection but instead turn on their inhabitants, is unsettling yet inviting. The collection opens with a dinner party with a gruesome twist and goes on to tales of people driven to despair by a neighbour's crying baby, a family torn apart by strange notes and a woman's relationship with her new partner's strangely shy daughter. I ate every single story up, and would recommend this book to anyone, horror fan or otherwise. If you'd told me last year that some of my favourite reads of 2025 would be young adult novels, I wouldn't have believed you. But after falling in love with Rebecca Ross' Divine Rivals duology, I went on to Immortal Consequences, the first book in a new YA dark academia series following students at a boarding school on the fringes of the afterlife. In Immortal Consequences, the students must compete in the Decennial - a series of magical trials held once a decade. We follow six different students, all with their own motivations and hidden agendas. With chapters from so many characters' perspectives, I was initially worried they wouldn't be fleshed out enough, but I needn't have worried. I was so invested in each and every one of the characters, and cannot wait to see where the series goes next. I clearly have a thing for books with chapters from lots of different points of view, because My Other Heart has been another favourite read of the year for me. In 1998, Mimi and her baby daughter Ngan are on the way home from Philadelphia to Vietnam when Ngan suddenly goes missing. Seventeen years later, best friends Kit and Sabrina plan trips to Tokyo and China respectively to find out more about who they are. This is a beautiful coming-of-age story, spanning decades and several different continents. And with universal themes of identity, friendship, love and motherhood, everyone will see a little part of themselves in the characters. Sunstruck follows a working-class Black man as he attempts to navigate the lavish world of his university friend Lily's affluent family. Over the course of a summer spent holidaying in the south of France, the man finds himself drawn to Lily's charming brother Felix. But when they return to London, things shift and the cracks in the Blake family's facade begin to show. As the winner of the #Merky Books' 2022 New Writers' Prize, I knew it was going to be good, but it surpassed all expectations and I can't wait to see what the author does next. Sunstruck is an intoxicating read, and one I finished in one sunny weekend earlier this year. Don't just take my word for it though; it's also one of the shortlisted titles for Waterstones' 2025 Debut Fiction Prize and would be a worthy winner. Saraswati is another of my stand-out reads that has also been nominated for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. Gurnaik Johal's debut novel sees the lives of seven individuals changed as an ancient sacred river springs back to life. Part political satire, part ecological parable, this is a great novel to sink your teeth into if you want something that will both entertain and make you think. As a lover of short stories, I really appreciated the format and pacing of Saraswati; each chapter introduces us to a new character, with each of the seven strangers getting their own moment in the spotlight before everything comes together. I was enthralled, and will definitely be reading We Move, the author's collection of short stories, soon. Atmosphere is a love story set against the backdrop of the 1980s space shuttle program. It follows Joan Goodwin, an astrophysics professor who finds love, friendship and rivalry while training to become an astronaut. But then, on a mission in December 1984, everything changes in an instant. As a big fan of both romance and science fiction, I had high expectations going into this. Luckily, it did not disappoint. Joan's relationships are complex, and the side characters are so fleshed out they actually feel like real people. I'm not someone who tends to cry a lot while reading, but this book had me in tears on multiple occasions, and I couldn't stop thinking about the ending for weeks.
WIRED
15 hours ago
- Politics
- WIRED
Substack Is Having a Moment—Again. But Time Is Running Out
Jun 27, 2025 2:29 PM While star reporters continue to flock to Substack, subscription fatigue is only getting worse. The Substack homepage on a smartphone. Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph:Before June 8, the skilled and respected ABC News television journalist Terry Moran was neither a household name nor political lightning rod. That changed abruptly when Moran posted on X that Donald Trump's deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was 'a world-class hater,' followed by an addendum that the president was a hater as well. (The post was later taken down.) While the statements were certainly defendable, they apparently violated ABC policy, and Moran was suspended, then dismissed. Moran, though, had one move left. On June 11, he started writing on Substack. Moran was joining a movement based on a dream: Journalists could start a Substack newsletter and garner subscription fees that would match or exceed their previous salaries. And they would be editorially liberated! No editors to screw up copy, no censorship from bosses when advertisers complain, no corporate overlord to fire you when you say the president of the United States is a hater. Substack says that some people are indeed living the dream. CEO Chris Best recently boasted in a speech that 'more than 50' of its users were pulling in a million dollars in revenue. As more journalists get pushed out of their jobs, get fed up with their bosses, or just want to breathe the cool air of freedom, they now have what appears to be a viable escape hatch. Recently a lot of them are taking advantage of it. Jeff Bezos has been good to Substack: The Washington Post editorial page's apparent recent disinterest in stopping democracy from dying has led popular opinion writer Jennifer Rubin to start a publication called The Contrarian, and censored editorial Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes now publishes on Substack as well. Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hassan started his own publication. Even Chuck Todd has gone indie. You might be tempted to think that the Substack revolution is shaking up the foundations of journalism, agreeing with Substack star Emily Sundberg that newsroom leaders everywhere should be barring their doors to prevent further defections. Well, not so fast. The Substack model may work very well for a few, but it's not so easy to march in and match a salary. Readers have to pay a high price for a voice that they once enjoyed in a publication they subscribe to. And writers have to get used to the idea that the breadth of their wisdom is limited to a small percentage of patrons. Is Substack sustainable for writers addressing a general audience? Just in the last week or so, a cluster of critics have been publishing that the platform may be on shaky ground. It started when Eric Newcomer—posting on his own successful Substack—celebrated Substack's recent influx of big names and reported that the platform told investors it was taking in $45 million a year in revenue. He claimed it was seeking a new investment round which would value the company at $700 million. (Substack did not confirm those numbers.) This is an essay from the latest edition of Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter. SIGN UP for Plaintext to read the whole thing, and tap Steven's unique insights and unmatched contacts for the long view on tech. But then Dylan Byers of Puck (a publication on Substack) looked at those numbers and wondered whether the bottom line valuation was actually less than in the previous rounds. Byers, like other critics, charged that once you get past the few real big earners, the platform was full of low-flying mediocrities: 'The truth is that the vast majority of the content on Substack is boring, amateurish or batshit crazy,' he wrote. His conclusion was that Substack was a media company trying to be valued as a tech company, which is a familiar fail point for similar companies. (WIRED itself once failed at an IPO for that very reason.) Ana Marie Cox, who once enjoyed blogging fame as Wonkette, is even grimmer, writing in her newsletter that Substack 'is as unstable as a SpaceX launch.' She wasn't impressed with the more recent influx of name writers. 'How many Terry Morans does Substack have room for?' she wrote. 'Is there even a public appetite for a dozen Terry Morans, each independently Terry Moran-ing in his own newsletter?' Cox is referring to subscription fatigue, which is something I think of every time a sign-up page pops up when opening a new Substack. Typically, Substack pros solicit a monthly fee of $5-10 or an annual rate of $50-150. Usually there's a free tier of content, but journalists who hope to make at least part of their livelihood on Substack save the good stuff for paid customers. Compared to subscribing to full-fledged publications, this is a terrible value proposition. After leaving The Atlantic, celebrated writer Derek Thompson started a Substack that cost $80 a year—that's one penny more than a digital subscription to the magazine he just left! (The Atlantic will probably spend $300,000 to replace him with someone else worth reading.) It doesn't take too many of those subscriptions to match the cost of The New York Times, which probably has 100 journalists as good as Substack writers, and you get Wordle to boot. Those fees can pile up. I asked one news-junkie pal of mine how many indie subs she was paying for, and a quick audit showed 31 subs costing over $2,000 per year. But my friend is the exception who actually pays. The vast majority of subscribers on Substack don't. The cost emphasizes the non-egalitarian nature of the independent concept. While I love the idea of liberated journalists speaking out, the fact is that compared to a bundled package known as a publication, the lone-voice model monetizes by delivering full content only to patrons who can afford it. It's a downside for writers, who typically want to reach wider audiences. 'I'm guessing a lot [those writers] don't like not being in the broader conversation on a regular basis, even if they're getting paid more,' says M.G. Siegler, who writes tech commentary on Spyglass, his own free-and-pay indie column.(You will note that this newsletter, and this writer, are delivered to you as part of a larger legacy media stack, That's a conscious choice.) Substack prefers to dwell on its success stories. Look what happened to Casey Newton. In 2020, he left the Verge and started Platformer, and it's still going strong with a six-figure number of subscribers, some thousands of whom actually pay him real money for all his posts. 'Platformer succeeded beyond my expectations,' he told me. 'It let me buy a house in San Francisco. I'd honestly never thought I'd be able to do that.' But Newton no longer publishes on Substack. Platformer is now on another platform called Ghost. It's a choice that a number of successful indie journalists have made, mainly because alternatives don't take a tenth of revenues. (Newton left Substack mainly because he said he was unhappy that the founders didn't sufficiently condemn Nazi-oriented content.) Substack says that it uniquely offers journalists access to a broad community and has offered a social-media-like feed that's sort of an internal Twitter, but I don't sense that those features have taken off. Other potential Substackers, like former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy, have chosen a platform called Beehiiv. Unless they already have huge, passionate followings, newly independent journalists have a tough time rounding up enough subscribers to pay for even a fraction of a decent legacy media job. Newton says that early adopters like him had an easier time. 'Substack was shiny and new, and people were warming up to the idea,' he explains. He says that the decline of Twitter is another disadvantage for newer Substack writers. 'There was nothing like Twitter in the old days for finding new customers,' he says. 'Taking that away has made it meaningfully harder to promote their stuff.' Even Sundberg, who advised legacy media to sound the alarm about the Substack exodus, told a writer for Status that the window of opportunity for newbies might be closing. 'I wouldn't want to be starting now,' she says. For its part, Substack seems to be pivoting away from its roots. I first met the founders when they were going through Y Combinator's boot-camp-like experience, and they eagerly pitched me on their crusade to improve journalism. But now the Substack 'about' page promotes the site as 'the home for great culture,' describing itself as 'a new media app … [where] you can discover world-class video, podcasts, and writing from a diverse set of creators.' Note that 'writing' comes last in that hierarchy of creator output. Does Substack really think that its creator videos can compete with TikTok and Meta? (Substack did not make its executives available to comment.) Meanwhile, Moran is off to the races, posting anti-Trump comments without worrying about his job. He has over 100,000 subscribers, though it's not clear how many pay him. I read his comments and view his video posts via his free tier. No way will I pay him: I've already got ABC News on my cable, paid subscriptions to nearly a dozen publications and, yes, a bunch of Substack subs that I or my wife get billed for yearly or monthly. These include James Fallows, Jonathan Alter, Joyce Wadler, and Gregg Easterbrook, during the months he writes Tuesday Morning Quarterback. Even though the price is high for one single voice, I find those writers worth the cost. But I wish the legacy publications they once wrote for still employed them so I wouldn't have to pay a la carte. Don't miss future subscriber-only editions of this column. Subscribe to WIRED (50% off for Plaintext readers) today.
Bloomberg
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Bloomberg
Tina Brown: ‘I'm Concerned About American Women'
By What does someone who's spent 50 years in media see as journalism's next frontier? For Tina Brown, the answer is Substack, a newsletter platform to which she has taken with enthusiasm, even though it's a far cry from the vast teams (and budgets) she had editing Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. That period made her better known in the US than in her native Britain, but Brown has also written books on the royal family and co-founded a journalism initiative at a British university. In a wide-ranging conversation in London, Brown and I talked about people who have surprised her (among them one Donald Trump), about women on Instagram, and (in an 'asking for a friend' kind of way) about what works in media today. This interview, recorded before the US strikes on Iran, has been edited for length and clarity. Tina, you've long been a player in — as well as an observer of — media and power, and I wondered if I could start with some words from your book The Vanity Fair Diaries? Sure, I'm intrigued. The ones I've chosen are from January 1991. You're watching the airstrikes on Iraq at the beginning of the Gulf War and you say: 'There we were watching this massive attack as if it were a movie or a game, some strange new form of entertainment. I realized nothing like this had ever happened on TV before, not in real time. Real people were dying and what we felt was mainly excitement at the spectacle.' That's interesting because of the Middle East now, but also because of that moment in media, the beginning of the 24-hour TV news age — which is probably now leaving us. It is an extraordinary thing to consider that. We really hadn't seen that before. And now it's what we live amongst. I don't know whether it's leaving. I still feel that one does turn to cable news when these massive things happen. But I also know that world is definitely dying. Cable news channels are not the future. 1 So it's a bit alarming because if we're really just going to be left with this massive universe of streaming things, I don't know where we are going to get the focus. She is speaking here about the shift from traditional TV to streaming and how it's playing out at major media conglomerates — none of which are particularly keen to own cable companies anymore. In May, streaming's share of total US television usage hit 44.8%, according to Nielsen, outpacing the combined share of broadcast and cable for the first time ever. What about this moment in American politics? How does it feel to you? It feels like a madhouse because we've got a president who does everything from the top down. When I read that President Trump is assembling his intimate advisers in the War Room, I'm thinking, Look at who those advisers are. This Fox News guy heading the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, [and] Tulsi Gabbard, who's the director of intelligence. You have a real estate guy [Steve Witkoff] 2 who's never had any experience of diplomacy. This is what I think is so unsettling, the feeling that our leadership is just so amateurish in such a huge crisis. Trump has been friends with Witkoff since the 1980s. As Bloomberg noted in March, his role as a key envoy and proxy for the president has shaken up Washington's traditional power structures. The president has a mandate – majorities in both houses of Congress and a sweeping victory in the electoral college last year. You've known him for decades. Could you ever have imagined that that New York property developer you started to cover when you were editing Vanity Fair would one day be president of the United States? No, it would've seemed a cartoonish notion. He did always seem like somebody who was going further than where he was. He has this extraordinary will to win that you can't take away from him. His exile for four years actually turns out to have been the most lethal thing for the Democrats or anyone who disagrees with him. In those four years he sat there thinking, Okay, next time around I'm doing it completely differently. You have to have a loyalty pledge before you even come near my White House. The only thing that is Trump's dilemma now is that he also always said, No more foreign wars. 3 To stop engaging in 'endless' or 'forever' wars has been a Trump refrain since his first campaign for the White House. Way back in November 2013, he criticized then-President Barack Obama for suggesting the US could strike Iran, saying it was a result of Obama's 'inability to negotiate properly.' I heard you speak recently about the need for a 'conglomerate of courage. ' I wonder where you think the Democrats are in all of this. Who do you see as the person who in three years' time could challenge this administration? We haven't seen anyone yet who has the charisma, the media power, that Trump commands. And I do strongly feel that this is now an absolutely critical part of the skillset required to even run for anything. 4 If you don't have it, you are just not going to get through the noise. You cannot be a thoughtful, good-on-television-sometimes, strategic person and think you're going to win the presidency. In a book we reviewed last year, sociologist Julia Sonnevend unpacks the importance of magnetic personalities to modern politics, identifying specific techniques such as 'de-masking' — letting the public into private moments — and 're-staging,' or moving an event to a surprising setting. Are you saying you can't be US president without being a celebrity? It's possible that you haven't been a celebrity before, but by the time you are in that race, you have to have celebrity skills. You have to be a multi-platform person. Trump isn't just brilliant in front of a crowd. He has such a sense of his audience and what they want, and he really approaches his presidency like episodes of a reality show. You did like him, didn't you? When you were in New York together? Very much. Look, New York is full of showboating, huckster-ish, swinging kind of guys who are kind of fun to sit with at dinner. They're not necessarily people you would adore spending a huge amount of time with, but they're fun and they light up a room. And that's what Trump was. He was a refreshing character at that time. But you know, he did change, 5 and he changed during the time that I was covering him. Brown has said that she thinks the end of Trump's first marriage and his financial problems in the 1990s were factors. In 2018, she told Politico: 'Before the divorce, he was seen as a somewhat appealing con man — a big mouth but a big figure. After, with the divorce and the bankruptcies, he seemed like a more tawdry person.' You sound worried about this moment in America. And yet, I'm also struck by the fact that I think a lot of the Tina Brown we see today is because of America, or made in America. [ Brown laughs. ] You went there 40 years ago, and I read that you looked around New York and felt American women were so ahead of British women, that they had this confidence. They knew how to speak, they knew how to present themselves, and you learned from that. I did actually. I was far more retiring, personally — not in my career, but in terms of getting up on a stage and making a speech. I'd never actually done that before I came to the US. Even during my time at the New Yorker, I always put my writers on television. I never wanted to be the one who was on television. That changed when I started writing my books. When you have to go out there and promote, now I recognize that it's so much a part of what you have to do. 6 In 2009 Brown founded Women in the World, a live journalism platform to 'discover and amplify the unheard voices of global women on the front lines of change.' Before the Covid pandemic shut it down, the final annual summit in New York asked the question 'Can Women Save the World?' So I did learn from American women. I have to say that I'm concerned about American women at the moment. I feel women in America are going through a really invisible time. Where are they in all of this? It seems to be a completely male-dominated world-affairs platform, or women in the Trump group are in this mold [where] appearance is the first thing you notice. It's kind of impacted everything. I mean, Instagram now: Women of substance keep posing on Instagram as if they're Kim Kardashian. I'm looking at women who are running big agencies in advertising or who are women of substance and they're posting pictures of themselves in bikinis and it's all sort of frothy, it's ridiculous. 7 I don't know who she is thinking of here but my own Instagram feed flashed before my eyes at this moment. Definitely no bikinis, but there are some selfies... It's a very odd moment, I think, and a rather disappointing one. But Tina, you came from the world of magazines, pages and pages of advertising. You have to work quite hard to find the actual articles. It's a version of your old world. It is a version except that in between the adverts were also fabulous pieces about politics and world affairs. 8 We really did do very good journalism in Vanity Fair. It's hard now to find places to do strong journalism. It's vanishing. Brown has long said her journalism is 'high-low,' combining what might otherwise have belonged in different publications. The famous August 1991 issue of Vanity Fair, for example, featured a naked, pregnant Demi Moore on the cover and also had pieces about Saddam Hussein and Vaclav Havel. You've made a success of your newest venture. You are on Substack and we see you in your own voice, with your opinions, holding forth in your own right. Which aspect, if any, do you miss of the old world? The impact? The teamwork? I would say all of it. But mostly, one of my great joys in life is assigning stories. I can, in Fresh Hell, give my take on the Iran situation or whatever. But there is not the ability to assign reporters to do that sort of juicy, deep dive into Does Iran really have weapons of mass destruction? I miss being able to call these writers and say, You should go now and do this story. I do also very much miss, at times, the visual component of magazines — working with photographers' pictures and the hierarchy of excitement that you can create by saying, Okay, huge, double-page spread, big splash, incredible picture, big headline. You can't do that digitally. It's all the same. It's just a little picture and a headline, and a social media blast and a TikTok thing. Get the Bloomberg Weekend newsletter. Big ideas and open questions in the fascinating places where finance, life and culture meet. Sign Up By continuing, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. I want to ask you about royal celebrity because you wrote about and commissioned pieces about Princess Diana. You knew her as a person. Do you think she was hounded by the press? It's a very interesting question. Of course Diana was hounded by the press, but she was a real collaborator in her own celebrity victimization. You have to give her a huge pass because she was sort of a child when she married Charles. Imagine you're 20 and dealing with the monarchy, and your husband isn't actually in love with you. I have huge sympathy for her, struggling with that era of her life. But the second part of her life, her late 20s and early 30s, she really played the press like a fiddle in many ways. She was in constant contact with them. And there is a way to be private if you want to be. There are many major celebrities in Hollywood who do lead a very private life. The George Clooneys of the world aren't spending their time trailed by people. Diana was actually tipping off the press a lot of the time on where she was. And she really did use the press as leverage in her various romantic situations. Going back to what we said at the beginning, she had everything we're talking about. She didn't just have this incredible telegenic star power. She knew how to use it and she knew when, and exactly in what manner to deploy it. I want to come back to you. I was struck, reading about the way that you've described your long marriage to Sir Harry Evans, who was already editor of the Sunday Times — a crucial role in British journalism – when you met him. You were incredibly young at the time, only 21. In stark contrast to Charles and Diana, he was really supportive of your career and enjoyed all the attention you got, because you became more famous than him once you came to America. Only in America, yes. Harry was steadfast, but also he was very self-confident. In the end, a man who's threatened by his wife's success is essentially insecure. And Harry wasn't insecure. He had a kind of masculine self-confidence that just wasn't threatened by it. He enjoyed it, he thought it was exciting, and he taught me so much as an editor. He was really my mentor as well as my husband. 9 Evans' successes at the Sunday Times included uncovering the thalidomide scandal of the 1950s and early '60s. He was later forced out of the Times newspapers soon after they were bought by Rupert Murdoch. After Evans' death in 2020, Brown co-founded a journalism fellowship and the UK's Truth Tellers summit in his honor. When I used to come home in the evening, I would bring the dummy, the fake magazine with all the pictures stuck in, as they were in those days. And he'd say, 'You should lose this. This isn't right. Make the picture bigger.' He was my third eye and my critic and he loved it. And when it succeeded, he couldn't have been more pleased. At the height of your powers, during the years you were editing the New Yorker, there was a moment where you suggested to Si Newhouse of Condé Nast that the New Yorker could be more than a magazine. It could have a radio show, what we might today call a podcast, attached to it. And he said, basically, 'Get back in your box.' Totally. He actually uttered the phrase — which is the final thing that made me leave — 'Stick to your knitting.' 10 Like, 'Stay in your lane.' I found this breathtaking, largely because of how senior she was at the time. My one experience of this kind was when I was about 30 and had only recently moved from production to being in front of the camera. I ventured an opinion on TV graphics, asking whether the markets arrows could be made bigger, for clarity. 'Stick to what you are good at,' an editor said, 'which is presenting.' I thought, We've reduced the losses at the New Yorker, but we're never going to turn this into profit if we just depend on advertising, because it was a serious weekly magazine and that's not what advertisers want. I remember saying to him, 'We could be like the HBO of print. People will pay for the New Yorker. We should have a book-publishing arm and we could do a radio show. I'm constantly being asked about turning pieces into movies and they are sold to the movies. We get nothing out of it. Why can't we have a production arm?' It took him 15 years after I left to finally go in that direction. 11 A decade after Brown resigned, the 2008 financial crisis took a considerable toll on Condé Nast. But the relationship between Newhouse and Brown benefited both parties for years: 'Newhouse encouraged Brown to live the life she chronicled: Every lunch was a power lunch, every dinner a party,' according to our review of a recent book about the media empire. Let's close by looking to the future. There are some recent Reuters figures on news consumption, which I have to say are not encouraging. 12 I have an interest here because I'm part of something new here at Bloomberg Weekend, so I'm going to ask you to distill all your years of experience to advise me. What works in engagement, so that people are prepared to come back week after week? The Reuters Digital News Report 2025 fount that the shift to social media and video platforms 'is further diminishing the influence of 'institutional journalism' and supercharging a fragmented alternative media environment containing an array of podcasters, YouTubers and TikTokers.' I'm going to bore you by saying I still firmly believe in quality, but done with enough flair to lure people to listen. I do not think putting a 20,000-word Pulitzer prize-winning article out there [means] that people are going to read it. They're not. They're just not. I have always been able to do this with my magazines, taking that content and bringing it to people. And it's really about seduction points – the headlines, the packaging, the presentation, the graphics, the music. It's all enormously important to getting people to listen and read and so forth. You have to keep thinking all the time, People will be bored. People won't read it. It has to be the number one thought in your mind. However serious your publishing is, you still have to be good at seduction. An ability to lure people through that door will always be about that. I am writing down the word 'seduction' and making a note that it is not to be confused with bikinis on Instagram, which we know you are firmly against. I am so against. Mainly because I can't wear a bikini on Instagram. I wish all those who can happiness and health. Mishal Husain is Editor at Large for Bloomberg Weekend. More On Bloomberg Terms of Service Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information Trademarks Privacy Policy Careers Made in NYC Advertise Ad Choices Help ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved.
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Substack app. Credit - Gabby Jones—Bloomberg/Getty Images In an era when readers gobble up free content served by algorithms, Substack has defied gravity by securing 5 million customers who pay to read original writing. Though the company remains unprofitable, its platform—designed to handle 'everything but the hard part: the writing itself'—has enabled thousands of writers to earn money independent of major media organizations through paid subscriptions to newsletters and other content. It's drawn scores of writers—including standouts like Heather Cox Richardson, Nate Silver, Mehdi Hasan, and economist Paul Krugman—with some earning millions of dollars via the platform. In January, it announced $20 million in guarantees to help creators launch subscriptions. 'People are hungry for media relationships with the writers and creators they really trust,' says co-founder Hamish McKenzie. 'There's a recognition that the kinds of media experiences you get from the doom scroll feeds corrode the soul and lessen the quality of the life you have.' Contact us at letters@
