Tina Brown and Cathie Black Tackle the Impossible -- Again

NEW YORK – With a double-barreled launching of female power, two celebrated media giants, Tina Brown and Cathleen P. Black, commanded the attention of this blasé city and the nation this week.

In separate moves, each has agreed to take on daunting challenges that many regard as either lost causes or unfixable problems. Each has proved her mettle in media wars, and each can claim first-woman-ever titles in some of the toughest arenas of publishing and management.

Tina Brown, who made Vanity Fair into a magazine phenomenon, has agreed to merge her news and political web site, The Daily Beast, with Newsweek to try to inject new journalism ideas and techniques into a declining print magazine.

Cathie Black, who has been a top executive at Hearst Corp. for 15 years, is leaving her glass-tower office to manage the nation's largest school system.

The stunning news this week began with Black, 66, the tall slim blond who is the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, a position that places her on the high plane of the publishing industry. On Tuesday, to the surprise and shock of just about everybody, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg appointed her New York City's public schools chancellor, a role that few have been able to master.

She will lead of one of the most complex bureaucracies in this politically combustible city. The school system must accommodate the most diverse population in the nation, with students who speak upwards of 100 different languages. Black is expected to press for reforms and find solutions for failing schools, failing teachers, budget restrictions and a catalog of other ailments that have defied many who came before her.

She will be the first woman to head the system, which has 1.1 million students, 80,000 teachers and more than 1,400 schools. It has undergone radical reforms with mixed results under departing chancellor Joel Klein, who will become an executive vice president of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Klein himself emerged in 2002 from the media world but with a little more education experience than Black, who has none.

She comes out of the same high-end business world and upper-class social circle as Bloomberg. They have known each other socially for many years, and those who know the mayor's mind or the way he plucks successful managers for government jobs are not surprised that he had his eye on Black. Her management record is widely heralded, and no one doubts her ambition, drive and determination to carry out her mandate.

Her appointment set off a furor here with nearly daily front page stories and endless speculation about Bloomberg's secretive selection process and why he chose her. Criticism has come from officials and politicians who felt left out of the selection process and longtime educators and members of the city's ultra-powerful teachers' union. Praise has come from Black's colleagues, business and media executives and some members of the state's education establishment.

Bloomberg defended his choice and the way he made it, saying, "Cathie is a world-class manager." As to the process, which he kept secret even from close aides, he said on Friday, "We spent a lot of time looking around the world for the best people and we have a list of people in mind...To go through a lengthy search process in the middle of a school year is just not something that is in our kids' interest. We got to keep going here."

No doubt Black, who has more firsts beside her name than most people, will push long and hard. She was the first woman to head the Hearst Corp.'s magazine division and the first female publisher of a weekly consumer magazine (New York, 1979). She saved USA Today in the 1980s when she became publisher and drummed up advertising. "Without her, USA Today would likely have failed," said Allen H. Neuharth, the newspaper's founder.

There seems to be little she can't or won't tackle. She helped persuade Oprah Winfrey to create O, the Oprah Magazine, a huge success. And when it became evident that Talk magazine, a joint venture of Hearst and Miramax edited by Tina Brown, was failing, Black shut it down.

Just as she handles her management jobs with clear expectations and little patience for failure, she wields charm with ease. I met her in Washington in 1994, while I was preparing an article for Vanity Fair on the most powerful women in the capital. She was open, direct, even warm, while keeping her guard up at all times. We talked for hours in her office and at her plush home off Connecticut Avenue. She was solicitous, knowing how much reporters appreciate cooperation, and even drove me home once in her jade-green Jaguar. I met her two children, Alison and Duffy, both adopted, and her husband, Thomas E. Harvey, a lawyer for the Institute of International Education, and a contributor, like his wife, to Republican candidates.

Black grew up Roman Catholic on the South Side of Chicago, attended parochial schools and Trinity College in Washington. Her children attend private school in Connecticut. The family has homes on Park Avenue and in Connecticut. She lives expensively, rides in limousines, and gives lush catered parties, like the 50^th birthday party she gave herself at her home in Washington in 1994. Every major media player in town was there.

In her 2007 book, "Basic Black," a reader-friendly career memoir, she was not afraid to disclose her mistakes. Much as she seems to live a charmed life, the dark sides are there, the bumps and failures. Most recently, she suffered a public defeat when Hearst appointed David Carey, a rival from Condé Nast, to replace her as president of the magazine group.

But then Bloomberg called, asking to meet her, offering her the biggest challenge of her life, and she's back in the thick of things.

Next to Black, Tina Brown has a relatively easy challenge saving Newsweek from extinction. She's an old hand at reviving declining or troubled magazines. She rescued Vanity Fair from collapse in the 1980s and re-invented it, focusing on celebrities and big scandal stories. Within a few years she had taken Vanity Fair to the top of the magazine industry and in 1993 she left it to overhaul the stodgy New Yorker magazine. She became the supernova of the industry, arguably the most celebrated, adulated and buzzed about editor in the business.

But like Cathie Black, she has endured failures. Talk magazine was a disaster. Her talk show failed. A couple of years ago she ventured into online journalism, editing the web site The Daily Beast, which is financed by the media industrialist Barry Diller. Together, they agreed this week to a merger with Sidney Harman, the 92-year-old California stereo-equipment entrepreneur who recently bought Newsweek.

The news broke late Thursday and was officially announced on Friday. Tina Brown, Diller and Harman had broken off negotiations three weeks ago and the deal had been left for dead.

But Harman needed Brown and Diller if he wanted to save Newsweek, which is a shadow of its former self. Talks resumed, and the agreement was reached to have a 50-50 joint venture called the Newsweek Daily Beast Co. Harman will be the executive chairman, and The Daily Beast president, Stephen Colvin, will be the chief executive. Brown will report to a board of directors that includes Diller, chairman and chief executive of Daily Beast owner IA/InterActiveCorp. If the deal goes through, it could stabilize the financial situations of both organizations. Newsweek has been expected to lose $20 million this year. The Daily Beast will lose $10 million.

Everyone seems to have got what he or she wanted.

Brown, who will be 57 in November, got creative independence and a print publication to revive. Harman got a woman he called "one of the transcendent editors of all time." Diller got a big piece of what may be the first combined operation of new and old journalism, an experiment that will have the media industry buzzing.

For Tina Brown it's the latest challenge in a career that has thrived on the impossible.