Tina Brown

Anne Kingston: Marquee names at Women in the World do what host Tina Brown’s celebrity magazine covers once did: make you buy the issue so you’ll read the more interesting stories inside

The Prime Minister will be speaking with Tina Brown at the Toronto conference around 1 pm ET

Women of power, influence and—yes—privilege gathered recently in Manhattan. As Anne Kingston writes, their show of strength could not be more timely.

The PM stuck to familiar notes during his appearance at the Women in the World Summit, but it was music to the ears of his audience

Miss America makes history, Vasek Pospisil nurses more than his ankle and Pope Francis gets a new ride

Tina Brown’s redesigned Newsweek is a mixed bag, but more promising on the whole than the glum tract that had been appearing under that title. One of her  coups is the addition of historian Niall Ferguson as a columnist. Ferguson writes bestselling books and is a hot ticket on the speaker circuit, but I’m starting to worry he’s not quite cut out for shorter formats.

From the New York Observer, word that the failed negotiation between nonogenarian millionaire-not-billionaire Newsweek bailer-outer Sidney Harman and Daily Beast proprietor Barry Diller didn’t actually fail; it seems likely to produce a deal by which Newsweek and the Daily Beast will merge, with Tina Brown editing the whole online-offline shebang.

I confess I’m loving the Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s latest attempt to mix sensational and serious journalism. (She remade Vanity Fair in the ’80s, revived The New Yorker in the ’90s — though yes, I greatly prefer both magazines under the editors who succeeded her — and faceplanted with Talk after that.) Daily Beast is a mix of aggregating, reporting and blogging, clearly designed to take on Huffington Post. It’s existing in a financial fantasy world for the moment, pushing out high-impact original journalism and selling no ads, a path the National Post trod in its early years, with the results we all know. But for however long it lasts, it’s high-calorie fun. Here’s Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s campaign manger, describing the moment when he realized his candidate couldn’t win. It was about five weeks before the vote — coincidentally, the length of a standard Canadian general-election campaign.