And so passes the glory of Tina Brown, one of the great magazine editors of her time. Which passed 15 or so years ago. WWD’s dishy story from inside the Newsweek/Daily Beast meltdown this week is pretty devastating. This one line, in which Tina orders her staff to find a substitute for a story that fell through late in the process, says so much:

“Jane Fonda! She’s speaking at the 92nd Street Y tonight. Let’s get her,” Brown said.

As the WWD piece points out, Fonda was already at the end of her publicity tour. She was old news by then. But the bigger point is: Jane Fonda? Really? In 2011? This is not a magazine edited by someone who has her pulse on the cutting edge of the Zeitgeist any longer. This is a magazine edited by a middle-aged woman who thinks what her aging Manhattan elite friends are talking about at any given moment is the same thing as what the broader culture is talking about.

I can’t help my fascination with this story. Tina really was great once. Garrison Keillor and the old-timers at the New Yorker hated what she did to that magazine. Not me. She saved it. I started subscribing when she took over, and aside from some missteps, her tenure at the magazine was a boon for it. Aired out the place. I think her decline and fall has been so interesting, at least for media people, is that she was once so admired and so feared. Her brutal, bossypants treatment of her staff was excusable, or so it seemed, because she brought some really great (or at least interesting) writing out of them. Now she just seems like a weirdly inept bully. It’s as if Steve Jobs’s manic bullying resulted in the Zune.