Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in the year 2000 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a journalist in a career often devoted to the lives and works of the famous and influential

she's become a celebrity in her own right.

At Oxford she wrote an article which propelled her into journalism with the New Statesman,

The Sunday Times and Punch, and then at the age of 25 to editor of the Tatler.

Here she introduced the Debbs newspaper to some bad company, as put it and boosted circulation to such an extent that her publishers summoned her to New York to edit Vanity Fair.

She's lived in America ever since. Her startling success at the magazine which brought her there was

followed by a less certain stint at that Leviathan of American culture the New Yorker.

Now she's running a brand new publication, Talk magazine. Success is by no means assured, but the woman in charge

remains calm and still controversial. After 20 years of being an editor, she says, I've fired

a lot of people and killed a lot of copy. You don't make friends that way. She is Tina Brown.

You've certainly sailed Tina and continue to sail in some very choppy waters. Has it become a kind of natural habitat for you?

Well I've always loved new challenges and I've always loved controversy really. I mean I enjoy

biting off new projects that are the cause I suppose of a certain amount of

difficulty along the way but I've always made a lot of friends I've loved the

work I love the the journalism in a sense but you have to develop a pretty thick skin at the same time.

It's very high profile, it's big business.

Everybody's watching and everybody's waiting in the wings to bring you down.

Yes, it's always been very high profile, but I've also, you know, learned that it, the most important

thing is you focus on the work, you focus on the quality, you don't sort of look left or right, and you get on with it.

So you don't feel the flack, you just think...

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