MediaBistro’s smart series continues with Diane Clehane’s “So What Do You Do…?” interview with Tina Brown. A highlight from the section Emdashes readers will be jumping to anyway:

What do you consider your greatest success?
I do think The New Yorker was a very exciting success. As much as I loved Vanity Fair and still do, I still feel The New Yorker was the harder challenge. The stakes were so high with The New Yorker. I felt all the time I was doing it there wasn’t an option to fail. If the magazine not a viable proposition or set for closure — and it was really going down so badly when I took it over. It was so important to revitalize this magazine — the letters, narrative journalism, high standards and the writers that could take three weeks to six months on a story could still be allowed to do that work. What I did realize was that no one again ever was going to start up a magazine that would allow literary journalists to go off months at a time to study and write and do something, so if we failed it would be a horrible consequence.