She hasn’t had a successful venture in over a decade. Couple with this the fact that Barry “IAC is sucking wind” Diller is backing her, and this is a big waste of money. I’m not underestimating her — I’m estimating that she’ll be a failure like she has been in her N post-New York ventures. There are only a few magazine editors who “get” the Internet — Adam Moss and former Brown deputy Maer Roshan are the only ones I can think of, and Tina isn’t among them. I guess we’ll see in the coming months if Bonnie Fuller can make the leap.

But does she know just how *tough* it is?

Welcome back to the world of blogging. It is interesting to hear Tina Brown’s thoughts, but yet they are not new and not any more likely to pan out today as previously.

Particularly there is always the notion (promoted usually by old-school editorial types) that what the web needs is a good set of editors. As an editorial type myself originally, I can see the benefits, but having been on the business side long enough I have never seen the economics.

When I was at News Corp’s iGuide in 1995 it was an editorially-driven web service headed up by some of Murdoch’s top talent such as Anthea Disney. Murdoch canned it when he realized he couldn’t justify footing the bill.

When I joined Excite in 1996 the company also had a strong editorial sensibility headed up by the legendary Jim Bellows — and the original concept was to complement Excite’s search results with strong editorial website reviews. Excite canned it when the economics didn’t add up.

These are just two examples of early efforts to “edit” the web. Many more have come and gone, all victim to the economics. It is far cheaper to let computers crunch websites than people. Advertising revenues pay for CPU cycles more easily than for editors.

About.com started to get it right when they paid contributors based on a share of ad revenues generated rather than on a salary. But they also made it clear that About.com provided contributors with a supplement to their income, and not a primary income.

The blog networks arguably are only successful when they pay their editors very modestly, and we’ve seen some of them switch to a more performance-based form of compensation for editors, reflecting economic realities. Shiny Media recently fell apart here in the UK for similar reasons – ad revenues do not justify expensive editorial.

Arguably the notable blog network successes — such as Weblogs, Inc. — were successful more as exits via trade sale than as sustainable business models.

For this reason I am also skeptical of models such as Mahalo — not that it is not a great idea (reminiscent of the early Excite editorial model again) but that the economics are not likely to be any better this time around unless Calacanis pays his people plantation wages.

And this is the lesson for aspiring journalists too — if all you plan to be is a journalist, be prepared for hard work down on the digital plantation. Journalists and editors are at the bottom of the digital media food chain.

Better to prepare to be an entrepreneur — use digital tools to start and build your own business on the web based around your talent. Look at Rafat Ali and Om Malik as two prototypes. I hope that’s what you’re teaching them down at CUNY!

Best wishes,
Evan Rudowski