Brill built a small but remarkable empire, and it got away from him. He never managed to control his own destiny, and he ran into a buzz saw– apparently wielded, in this case, by Ted Turner. As a result, what he built is being chopped up, and may be sold for kindling.
Drinking a morning can of Tab in his Manhattan office last week, typically dressed for Wall Street but hunkered down amid manuscripts like a newshound, the usually hyper Brill looked a little shellshocked. For the past year or so, he’d been pushing to buy back from Time Warner what he’d created: Court TV, the magazines, an online service for lawyers. Maybe sell shares to the public. But Time Warner finally said it wanted to keep Court TV and sell off the other assets. So Brill decided to get out altogether.
Now, at 46, he’s having the odd experience of being talked about as if he were dead. Dozens of top journalists who passed through Brill’s hellish, rigorous tutelage swap stories, as if talking about some sepia-toned combination of Lou Grant and Mr. Chips. “What’s your first language? Romanian?” he scrawled on one of Leah Rozen’s stories in the early days. “He never let you get away with anything,” says Rozen, now with People. “He made you call lawyers you were scared to call, and you called them because you were more scared of him than you were of them.”
But Brill never wanted to run a journalism school. From the beginning he had a broader vision, and he did what big media companies try to do (and often don’t). He started with a little magazine, raised its profile, acquired more publications, went into television and then into high tech, extending the brand, as they like to say in the ’90s. The son of a liquor-store owner from Queens, he was an incorrigible journalist, but always trying to be a mogul.
What distinguished him is that he created his enterprise founded on lofty standards that can seem almost quaint in the highflying media universe. Consider, too, that American Lawyer is a trade publication, where the people it writes about are also the people buying ads, and the game by definition is to stroke them. Brill hobnobbed with big lawyers, then he’d gleefully hammer them in a story the following week. He got away with it.
Besides his own famous 1976 story calling the then saintly candidate Jimmy Carter a phony, Brill produced pieces that were relentlessly contrarian, exhaustively defending the Rodney King verdict and giving recent legitimacy to the claims of Paula Jones. Brill encouraged investigative reporting, and was a stickler for thoroughness. His corrections policy is a case in point: reporters get cash bonuses for reporting their own mistakes, and “Integrity Day” at the company is named after the day an associate producer, upon finding that a camera had briefly and disastrously scanned an O.J. alternate juror, told Judge Ito before she told her boss. “No damage control,” Brill says proudly.
Brill was able to keep his barely profitable print business growing with backing from a British newspaper company, which had launched him in 1979 with $$ million, and later helped him buy several regional legal publications, which he spiffed up.
Getting into cable TV involved a different kind of partner. In 1989 he persuaded Warner Communications to buy his company and launch Court TV. Like the magazine, it was more a succes d’estime than a profit center, but there were small triumphs. Part of Court TV’s coming-out party was the William Kennedy Smith rape trial. CNN went to live coverage, Court TV had better head-to-bead ratings and Brill told a trade magazine that he was afraid his coverage had been tarred by CNN’s “lousy and amateur news judgment.” He added: “We outreported them. We outhustled them. We had smarter people doing it.” He still likes to recount how people told him that during that trial, they did to CNN what CNN had done to the networks during the gulf war.
Figuratively, at least, such words were to come back to haunt him. Except for an O.J. spurt, Court TV’s ratings were tiny, but its reach grew to 30 million households, and its name was widely recognized. In today’s bizarre cable environment, that makes it worth a ton. Brill had total editorial control over Court TV, but he felt his expansion plans were being thwarted by a paralysis at the top, where three owner-partners, Time Warner, TCI and NBC, each had veto power, and a far bigger agenda than the fate of Court TV.
Brill wanted it under one roof. According to some people close to the situation, Time Warner’s management agreed to sell its stake to NBC and Brill at a price that valued everything at $600 million, keeping all the properties together. Ted Turner said no, and finally rejected a later plan that included NBC as a passive minority.
Turner wasn’t available to comment, but Time Warner downplays his role, saying the company simply feels that Court TV has value and wants to hang on to it.
As for Brill, he has to start all over, and says maybe he’ll use his own money this time. He insists, “I’ve been lucky in who I had for partners.” But it still seems sad when big media companies, whose job it is to finance, distribute and hold on to half-crazed creators with big ideas, let these people get away.
