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Saturday, Oct 11, 2008
Tina Brown's Talk may have more than it bargained for in its new executive editor.
Apr 21, 2000 | Last week, the New York Observer quietly broke the news that Tina Brown's Talk magazine finally had an executive editor. Vicky Ward, the news feature editor at the New York Post, had been hired to fill the post David Kuhn vacated when he went to Brill's Content five months ago.
"With Ms. Brown's focus increasingly on the broader affairs of Talk Media, Ms. Ward will be in charge of the day-to-day business of the actual magazine," wrote Observer media reporter Gabriel Snyder.
Since Kuhn's departure, editorial director Bob Wallace has been playing two roles, thinking long term while also managing the magazine's staff on a daily basis. Long before Talk launched last summer, there were tales of poor morale followed by editorial desertions. The numbers have also been grim. Though last year's debut issue in August sold out its print run of a million copies, prompting the printing of 300,000 more, the rate base for subsequent issues was 500,000, with 600,000 projected for this August. The arrival of Ward will allow him to focus more on the big picture, he says, claiming they have future issues mapped out until the end of the year.
"What I am expecting from Vicky is somebody who has the time and energy to read the newspapers every morning and keep us really focused on the news," said Wallace of his recent hire. But while Wallace is credited with bucking up the demoralized staff at Talk, Ward should not be expected to do the same. "At the New York Post," stated the Observer item, "people were surprised to see Ms. Ward, 30, go; just last February, she had been promoted to the newly created position of news feature editor."
Surprised? "We were literally cheering and dancing in the halls," said one Post staffer I spoke to. (Most of the current and former Post staffers I spoke to requested anonymity.) And the reaction seemed to go beyond simple water-cooler talk. Some of the people I spoke to had not worked there in over a year.
"When I read in the Observer that Talk had hired Vicky Ward, I froze," said one former Post reporter. "I thought, who do I call first and start screaming?"
Tales of disgruntled former employees are a dime a dozen, of course, in publishing as in every other racket. But the level of animosity I encountered while speaking to people who worked with her at the Murdoch-owned tabloid was remarkable -- and remarkably consistent.
"We all butted heads with her," said one writer. "But she's impervious, she's immune to human suffering, given how much she causes."
Wallace said he and Brown had heard some of the stories before they hired her. "I hear stories about everybody. If I based my hiring decisions on what I heard about people in New York, I wouldn't have a staff at all."
Some of Ward's problems at the Post may be chalked up to culture clash. Ward came to the Post from the U.K., with a background in tabloid journalism there. (She wrote for the Daily Mail as well as the Daily Telegraph and others.) But there seemed to be a difference between the tabloid culture there and that of the Post.
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