Remember, this was a time of irrational exhuberance. The dotcom revolution was in full swing. A company that sold dog food over the Web was valued at $100 million. Three letters of the alphabet, I.P.O., turned normally sensible people into sheep. Six months after leaving Time Warner, Brill announced his new magazine would be called Content.
Then whoops–the first stumbling block. It turned it out that another magazine was already being published by that name. Brill quickly redubbed his baby Brill’s Content and set about declaring himself the arbiter of the entire media world. In concept, Brill’s Content would cover approximately the same terrain as the Columbia Journalism Review, a staid trade publication that alternately cheered and chided working journalists. Never mind that CJR draws 20,000 paying subscribers. Brill aimed to attract 700,000. (For comparison purposes, after 77 years, The New Yorker magazine has just over 800,000 paying subscribers.) As he explained it, Brill’s Content would be bigger and better. Instead of just covering journalism, it would focus on “all non-fiction media” including newspapers, books, magazines, television, advertising and the Internet. “My instinct is this is the right time for this,” he said during an interview before the launch.
Currency guru George Soros and mogul Barry Diller signed on as backers. Along with Brill, they put up a total of $27 million in seed money. The buzz, never in short supply during the Great Tech Boom, grew loud quickly. Promotional mailings promised Brill’s Content would be a “fearless media watchdog.” It would take on some of the most well-known names in media–including the celebrity journalists who people the top three networks.
A month before the magazine debuted, Brill shot himself in the foot. Word leaked out that Brill had arranged a deal to turn pieces from Brill’s Content into coproduced television segments on “Dateline NBC.” Brill, it seemed, intended to be both an impartial judge of NBC and its business partner. “We had veto over everything produced,” Brill said at the time, defending the deal. But when reporters scoffed in print, Brill aborted the joint venture.
If Brill had his doubters, his first issue–which premiered in June 1998–seemed to prove them wrong. The magazine’s lengthy examination of the reporting surrounding the Monica Lewinsky scandal was the talk of the self-obsessed media world. But if that story, written by Brill himself, seemed polished and knowing, many of the issues that followed seemed anything but. The articles, critics said, were overlong and so earnest they made reading about the adrenaline-pumped business of journalism feel like homework.
Though the magazine struggled to remain current, with articles about the circus surrounding JonBenet Ramsey’s homicide, conglomerates gobbling up media outlets and CNN’s freefall, the long lead time of the monthly made many of the stories seem warmed over. Media-insiders, of all people, failed to embrace it. However, Brill’s magazine did find an audience of more than 300,000 well-educated, affluent subscribers. They “were the most enthusiastic consumers of media,” Brill says today. “The kind of people who would sit around on Sunday morning and watch the talk shows. All three.” A well-informed reader, yes. But not the kind that major advertisers wanted. “I thought they would be an attractive market for high-end electronics, computers and media services advertisers,” says Brill. But he was wrong. Advertisers, he said, simply didn’t follow.
Within the first year, many staffers quit or were fired. In the spring of 2000, Brill brought on former Talk editor and longtime Tina Brown protege David Kuhn to give the magazine some glitz. His new editor only deepened the magazine’s personality split. Outside of its red-hot epicenter, the day-to-day business of media can be anything but glamorous. Making it seem sexy to a wider reading public became a terrible burden. In Jan. 2001, Brill hooked up with Primedia and the sputtering Web site Inside.com in a flurry of deals that puzzled the media world. Soon the magazine shrunk in size. Eventually, it went from a monthly to a quarterly.
Finally, as the economic climate for magazines worsened, Brill’s Content became another casualty. Last week, Brill announced that his magazine was officially dead.
The irrepresible Brill seems chastened and has accepted full blame for the its failure. “This doesn’t mean that people aren’t interested in media,” he said. “It means I couldn’t make it work.” He wishes he had refined his initial idea. “If I had been more intelligent about it, I would have waited [another] six months. It deprived me of time to stop and think about things.” It would have given him a chance to see the flaws in his concept. Or maybe get it just right.
