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It isn't often one has the chance to sit in a room and be spun by not just one, not just two, but three masters of the promotional arts. Then again, it isn't every day that a major "new media venture" is announced. Well, actually, it is every day that a major new media venture is announced, or so it seems anyway.

The real news last week was that Tina Brown, editor of the New Yorker, had stopped the media world dead in its tracks with the announcement that she would be quitting the most prestigious job in magazines for a promising but also somewhat vague-sounding enterprise. Whatever its actual merits, in a world in which even Linda Tripp feels she needs a spokesperson, marketing is everything--a point Brown has often made herself. And whatever one thinks of the 44-year-old Briton's tenure at the New Yorker, she is indisputably the greatest buzz generator in the history of American publishing, author of the notion that a magazine must be talked about and not just read. Her new partner is himself no slouch in this regard: Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax Films, whose gift for salesmanship has helped generate 110 Academy Award nominations and 30 actual Oscars over the past decade for his company's generally ambitious movies (which include the likes of The Piano, Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting, as well as Scream). The third member of what Weinstein refers to, perhaps inevitably, as "the Three Musketeers" is Ronald A. Galotti, the "blockbuster publisher of Vogue" (Brown's words) and before that Brown's colleague as publisher of Vanity Fair, site of her previous editorship (both magazines are part of the Conde Nast group, owned by S.I. Newhouse Jr., who also owns the New Yorker). Though he cuts a lower media profile than his colleagues, Galotti is known to cognoscenti as the model for "Mr. Big" in the New York Observer's now discontinued "Sex and the City" column.

Clearly these are capable people. If all goes according to plan, their new media venture will produce television shows and publish books, and also create a new general-interest magazine in the hope that its articles will provide the germs for new films, some of which Brown and Galotti may also produce. "You don't have to be a genius to look at this project and understand how successful it's going to be," Galotti explains. Many observers agree that the move is a bold and brilliant one; a few see it as odd and maybe even foolish: Brown is either a visionary or months away from being just another Hollywood Jane with a development deal. Some see the new venture as the ultimate consummation of journalism's fascination with celebrity and glamour, of the notion that the news should be at least as entertaining as, say, a mediocre cartoon show. Even in a world where many news outlets are comparative backwaters amid larger, entertainment-oriented companies (like this magazine's parent, Time Warner), it is hard not to wonder whether some new threshold has been crossed. And if anyone is interested in turning this article into a movie--Should I beef up the Galotti bits for George Clooney?--please don't hesitate to call our publicity department.