Talk

» see talkmagazine.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Two companies with nothing in common shared a masthead for twenty-eight months. Talk Media was founded in July 1998, the same month Tina Brown left The New Yorker, as a venture between her and Miramax, with Ron Galotti brought over from Vogue to publish. Hearst came in during February 1999 to handle the printing and the circulation while Talk Media kept editorial and advertising. Harvey and Bob Weinstein were paying for half of a magazine, and a book imprint came with it.

The first issue appeared in September 1999 with a Hillary Clinton interview on the cover, the one where the First Lady talked about her husband's chronic need to please women. It was the most discussed magazine debut of its decade and the discussion never turned into a business. Circulation reached roughly 670,000, which sounds fine until you set it against what the thing cost to make. The complaint that stuck was that the magazine kept finding reasons to put Miramax's own actors on its pages.

On 18 January 2002, staff were called into a meeting with Brown and Galotti and told the venture was finished. The February issue, already sitting on newsstands that week, became the final one. The losses were put at around fifty million dollars across two and a half years, and Miramax paid Brown close to a million dollars to end a contract that still had two years left on it. None of this was ever on a newsstand I walked past. Talk reached Turkey the way American glossies generally did in 1999, as photographs of its launch party on somebody else's website, and by the time I had broadband worth the name it had been dead for four years.

~ the case file ~

~ the island ~

The launch party was held on 2 August 1999 on Liberty Island, at the foot of the statue. Around eight hundred people came. There was a picnic dinner, Japanese lanterns strung over the lawn and a Grucci fireworks display, and the guest list put Henry Kissinger in the same field as Queen Latifah and Salman Rushdie. For a few hours it was the most photographed party in New York.

It had not been meant to happen there. The original venue was the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the city blocked it. Rudy Giuliani was preparing to run for the Senate against Hillary Clinton, and Clinton was the cover of the first issue. A mayor denied a magazine a pier because of who was on its cover, so the magazine rented an island from the federal government instead. That is the single best story Talk ever produced, and it produced it before the first issue shipped.

~ what the website said ~

talkmagazine.com kept running on a Microsoft IIS 4.0 box long after the newsroom emptied. By April 2002 the root was redirecting everything to a one-page notice in a directory named tak_closing_files, and the page said: "We're sorry, but Talk magazine has suspended publication effective with the February 2002 issue." Suspended, not closed. Underneath it was a phone number, 1-800-678-7767, for anyone with questions about a subscription they had already paid for.

That notice was still being served in late 2002, which means the last employee of Talk was a redirect rule. The archive still holds the logo file as well, white letters on black with a red wedge behind the t, and it looks exactly as expensive as it was.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »