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Tina Brown and Harold Evans appear in first ever joint interview for CNN

Posted: 18/12/09 By: Judith Townend

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One of journalism's most famous couples, former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans and Daily Beast founder Tina Brown, will appear tonight on CNN's 'Amanpour' programme in their first ever joint interview.

Harold Evans, who is famed for his Sunday Times 'Insight' investigations, is optimistic for the future of pay walls, he tells Christiane Amanpour in the pre-recorded programme.

"If people find things of unique value they will be prepared to pay," he says.

"If Rupert Murdoch does as he's doing now, creating the Wall Street Journal, a first-class newspaper - there's no doubt about it [they will pay]. It's a first-class newspaper. And he and his editor have done that."

Tina Brown, who launched the Daily Beast in 2008 and was editor at Tatler, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, says she never understood the way newspapers gave away content for free: "They opened the door, gave away their content, and then were amazed when they weren't making any money. I never understood that theory in the beginning at all".

In the interview, Brown comments that Murdoch's attack on journalism being reproduced without payment was funny: "because a day later, he - the Wall Street Journal, which he owns, took a big piece out of something that I wrote and quoted it at exactly the kind of length that we do when we quote the Wall Street Journal."

"There's a little bit of overhype about theft in this sense. At the Daily Beast, anyway, we link to people. [W]e summarize and we link, and 70 percent of it is our own commissioned material, which is paid-for content ourselves, so we're not the actual kind of theft model that he's really talking about."

Earlier in the interview Brown, who married Evans in 1981, argues that it was management, not digital media, that damaged investigative reporting:

"I think there is a bad rap, in a sense, that digital media has ruined, as it were, journalism for the mainstream media.

"I would say the mainstream media, so called, has been ruined by the greed of management, because actually the greed of management was what has disemboweled newspapers and, frankly, killed off investigative reporting long before the digital world."

The couple also discuss the threat of UK libel law, their past careers and the differences between British and American reporting.

This interview can be seen in full on tonight's 'Amanpour', 21:00 GMT on CNN International www.cnn.com/amanpour

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