Stuart Elliott in America. (Opinion).

How now, Tina Brown?

Never mind that Talk magazine, the fabulously celebrated Brown's latest venture to captivate the Media-Entertainment Establishment, died faster than most dotcoms. All that the chattering classes can chatter about, still, weeks after Talk's corporate masters put the foundering magazine out of its misery is, whither Tina?

It has been fascinating to follow the trajectory of the coverage of the demise of Talk, which, as with all of Brown's previous ventures from Tatler to Vanity Fair to The New Yorker, has been covered far out of proportion to its influence or importance. Indeed, if only a fraction of the consumers devouring the Talk post-mortems had bought subscriptions, this column could have been about something really significant, such as why it took Levi Strauss years to realise that a British agency had more insight into the brand essence of all-American Levi's jeans than, to paraphrase the shrewish kewpie doll Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain, Lee Clowput together.

First, there were the respectful recountings of the official version of Talk's end, that it was as much a victim of 11 September as the brokers at work early that morning at Cantor Fitzgerald. If the aftermath of the terrorist attacks had not sent the economy reeling, this version asserted, as typified by one newspaper article headlined, "Talk Collapses Just As Strategy Was Taking Root" (no doubt written by the same copydesk stalwart who in April 1945 penned "Nazis Collapse Comes Despite Springtime for Hitler"), Talk would have found an investor to replace the risk-adverse Hearst Corporation, which was withdrawing from its uneasy publishing partnership with the far more ...