Now the talk is how the curtain came down on the Tina show

The British editor who 'conquered America' has set tongues wagging again. But now, with the closure of 'Talk', it's for all the wrong reasons.

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Anne McElvoy: Why we care about Tina

Tina Brown did the only sensible thing yesterday morning. She rose at her normal hour, took just a few calls – her husband, Harry Evans, had been minding an incessantly ringing telephone since before sun-up – and then took her daughter out for breakfast.

But if it was mum who needed the comfort of pancakes and syrup, you could hardly have blamed her. On Friday at 5pm she had summoned the staff of the monthly magazine she had founded in August 1999, Talk, and told them it was all over.

Failure is not something that Ms Brown, 48, knows much about. It was half her life ago that she took over a tired magazine called Tatler in Britain and made it hum. Her subsequent career is a media legend. She pulled it off again with Vanity Fair and then enjoyed six controversial years editing the New Yorker. Then came Talk.

Some will argue that Talk was doomed from the start. Certainly there was no shortage of people who were aching to see it founder. Success of the kind enjoyed by Ms Brown inevitably excites envy. She may have confounded her critics, but in the end, the sudden souring of the economy, made much worse by the terror attacks of 11 September, was too much for Talk. It became too costly for its investors.

The magazine's death, while widely predicted, was sudden. Ms Brown had been in Los Angeles on Thursday night for a Talk party ahead of tonight's Golden Globe awards. She learned only on Friday that the game was up, and she hastily flew back to New York. Her staff had almost finished wrapping up the March issue.

But it was work wasted. When she told Talk's 50-odd employees that what they had feared for weeks had come true, she said that the February issue had been their last. Afterwards, she and a few of her senior editors repaired to one of their homes to mournto loud music. "It was a wonderful, touching and close evening," she told The Independent on Sunday.

That Talk was in grave trouble became clear in November when word leaked that one of its two backers, Hearst Magazines, wanted to walk away from the venture, which was showing little sign of ever turning a profit. That left Ms Brown and her other backer, Miramax Films, little time to find a new investor.

They did try. The corpses of those felled by Ms Brown's irresistible powers of charm and persuasion are scattered across the two and a half decades of her career. She went to Conrad Black, owner of the Telegraph titles in Britain, as well as to Time Warner. Both declined. Interestingly, she never approached Rupert Murdoch, who sacked her husband as editor of The Times.

Ironically, Talk lately had reasons to boast. Its advertising revenue was up 6 per cent last year compared with 2000, while the rest of the industry saw a steep decline. And Talk ended 2001 with a circulation of 670,000, up 29 per cent from 2000. However, it had seen a slump in news-stand sales over the same period.

And nothing could disguise what remained a dismal outlook. Talk had racked up losses of $55m (£40m). Hearst, which had several other titles on the brink, could not justify staying with the venture. Ms Brown seems almost understanding about that. "The advertising climate has just collapsed," she said yesterday. "Looking for a new investor in this climate just wasn't viable." She is certain that if the events of 11 September had not happened a new investor would have been found.

The magazine was born amid huge brouhaha – she threw a magnificent party on Liberty Island – but also to mixed critical reviews. In two and a half years, she went through several redesigns and a succession of hirings and firings. She thinks she got it right at just the moment when the money dried up.

It was by last August, Ms Brown said, that "we really started to sing", adding: "It took us exactly the same amount of time at Vanity Fair. All the things that make a general-interest glossy magazine take a long time to get together." Not everyone would agree that Talk, which at first promised a new kind of symbiosis between films and the written word, was ever meant to be. "It's been clear essentially from the second issue that it was a failed idea," said Michael Wolff, media critic for New York magazine. "Expectations were so large that they couldn't possibly live up to it."

What next for Tina? Friends say that she and Harry remain committed to the country they have called home since 1984. She will stay as chairwoman of the sister business to the magazine, Talk Miramax Books, which put four titles in the bestseller lists last year and is not being closed.

And there is another option for Tina. The interest that the rest of the media showed in her had reached a level, she suggested yesterday, that was "preposterous". So now it may be her turn. Tina may have time to write her own book about the expat British editor who took New York and then – with a magazine called Talk – lost it again.

What Tina Brown said about them ...

Alex Kuczynski: "It is a shame that one of the two reporters on the story, Ms Kuczynski, who has a history of well-documented reportorial errors, was brought back from the Times's Style section to co-author this piece."

Author Michael Wolff: "He sidled into the room and fixed me with his baleful, masturbatory glare."

Writer Jamaica Kincaid (of their time together on The New Yorker): "Now that the dragons have been slain I am surrounded by talents like David Remnick and Joe Klein and Adam Gopnik."

Garrison Keillor: "The door is open any time he would like to come back."

... and what they said about her:

Michael Wolff (in The New Yorker): "...a woman in an outsized raincoat with a refugee-like scarf around her head."

Jamaica Kincaid: "Tina is a vulgarian who has turned The New Yorker into a version of People magazine."

Garrison Keillor: "Tina Brown hasn't changed The New Yorker, she has obliterated it... Once, The New Yorker was meant to be read; now it is only meant to be talked about."

Hillary Clinton: "Tina Brown is the junk food of journalism."

White House communications director Dan Bartlett: "[Tina Brown] openly opposed and even mocked the First Family's desire to keep the lives of their daughters private."