this is bbc news, the headlines: after four days of intense cross-border attacks, india and pakistan agree a full ceasefire. us president donald trump says the two sides came to an agreement after a long night of talks mediated by the us. donald trump talks on the phone with european leaders meeting with president zelensky in ukraine as calls grow for russia to agree to an unconditional 30-day ceasefire from monday. the european leaders warn russia will face more sanctions it it doesn't comply. ceasefire should last 30 days to give diplomacy a real chance. during this time, the work will be concentrated on defining security, political and humanitarian

basis for peace. all of us here together with the us are calling putin out. i'm katie razzall. i'm ros atkins. this week on the media show, we'll talk to the legendary magazine editor tina brown, who led vanity fair and the new yorker, but now is self-publishing on substack. we're joined by the co-founder of the platform, chris best, and he discusses his plans to woo the big beasts of media to substack. and we'll look at allegations that the hungarian government is supporting media that is friendly towards it

via the advertising that it buys. it's all coming up on the media show. our first guests today are a media legend and the tech executive whose company now publishes her writing. tina brown edited vanity fair, the new yorker and tatler, amongst others, but now she's self-publishing on the platform substack. chris best is the co-founder of substack, which now hosts a number of high-profile media names. both have been at the truth tellers conference in london, which tina brown set up to commemorate the work of her late husband, the newspaper editor sir harry evans. the idea was to create a summit, which is what we've done - we're on our third year - which brought together great global journalists from all over the world who are true fact-finding, fact-based, you know, fact-loving, brilliant storytellers

who i think have never been more indispensable. and harry was so worried about the state of journalism and the lack of trust and the collapse in trust and all of the things we've now faced accelerated now that it turned out to be a very good moment to start it. and it's really become a very exciting event. the first panel is titled will the press fight or fold? yes, cos i was going to ask you about that. it states, "president trump launching "a full-frontal assault on the press. "does the media still have the power to fight back "and the resolve to use it?" what's the answer? does it? well, i think it does, but it needs to be energised constantly, which is why i love doing the summit. we have to energise, valorise, excite journalists constantly, not to just get supine in the face of all of this, because one of the great issues they're facing is, is that trump is really going after the owners of media, essentially, with launching these very, you know, hugely expensive lawsuits when he doesn't like stories. and what we're seeing is that

they're folding, the owners. and in a way, a journalist can only be as brave as the platform he's on allows him to be. are you urging people to be braver, then? we are urging people not to give in, not to give up, but to fight back, because it is critical that american journalism maintains its freedom and its rigour and its ability to ask tough questions, which is eroding so fast at the moment. and, tina, you held a number of incredibly high-profile editorships, from vanity fair to the new yorker to tatler and others. i wonder what advice you offer to editors who are currently not feeling backed up by their owners. how can an editor, a seemingly very powerful figure within a news organisation, deal with the pressure that some are being put under at the moment? well, many of them are actually leaving and are going to work at substack. in fact, we've seen this a lot with the washington post and at cnn, is that people are saying, "you know what? there's only so much i can not do here,

"and if this goes on, i'm going to have to just jump." it's a hard decision to make in an era when media jobs are not in vast supply. but i know many journalists at the moment who are getting so frustrated by the timidity of their corporate owners that they really are thinking in that direction. and as well as doing this conference, you have also relatively recently gone on to substack. we want to ask you about that, but before we talk about your substack, we should establish what substack is. yes, cos i do want to bring in chris best. hello. hello. just, first of all, you co-founded substack. for the uninitiated, what is it? substack is a new media app that you can get. you can download on your phone, you can go on your computer, and it's a place you can go and discover a lot of the smartest and best independent thinkers, culture makers, journalists, artists, all kinds of things. i'd say the pitch is like, take back your mind rather than give your agency over to a social media algorithm that's just trying to keep you glued to it. on substack, you're subscribing to people.

you're subscribing to people that you trust or care about or value. it's free to download, and if you choose, you can pay for the ones you really value. and at the start, what was your pitch to writers to entice them to you, and has it evolved over time? yeah, well, my pitch, it's actually pretty similar, which is there's three things you probably care about. there's freedom, there's prestige and there's money. and i can't offer you prestige, but the other two are going to be much better on substack. many times, they'll do comically better financially. for the people who are great, it's often not a small difference. it's often a ten-times difference or more. and tina brown, when did substack, when did chris start wooing you and what was it that swung it? well, actually, they're very good at wooing. are they? what did they do? i was very annoying for a whole year. i was kind of dithering and dithering. and he has an excellent editor who's based in new york who would make his genial calls and suggest it, and i would blow him off. but actually, i came to really love the community of writers. i was thinking, obviously,

this is an interesting platform cos i am attracted to it, and i thought it would be more exciting to join something new than just to simply go back to doing a column or whatever. and i like the freedom it has. the fact is, is that you can do really as well as you want to work, essentially. i write fresh hell, my column is called, which i feel is appropriate to our times. i write sort of once a week, and i mean, look, i could write five times a week and do five times better. but some people write every day, and they're very good, i have to say, at substack, at telling you how you're doing all the time, which people like. journalists will publish something in the new york times, they have no idea... they're not even exposed to their... but i assume they give you the numbers, but would they tell you how you were doing editorially? would they go, "look, tina, "i'm not sure that one was quite..." no. they're not going to tell you that, but... deliberately, we won't. you don't want me being the editorial. and that's the part where, when i started, i did feel a bit like i was swimming naked because i'm so used to sending the copy in and there's somebody to come back and da-da-da-da, the backwards and forwards, so i did miss that, yes.

in fact, i then went and hired my own editor to do that cos i don't like swimming naked. except in the right places. exactly right. and, of course, i had my great husband for all those years, who was my ultimate editor. i was so lucky to be married to a great editor who would edit all my stuff. so now i have someone who does that. but that is interesting, that someone as experienced as you and as talented as you still sought out someone to bounce your work off before you publish. no, i need that. i absolutely need that. and i find it, frankly, too nerve-racking, particularly in today's world. i have a sort of reckless attitude to life and i do need somebody to say, "are you sure you want to say that?" because sometimes i'll go... i need that. i actually need that sort of bounce back, yes. and we know from your experience, from the experience of any number of other media figures that this is one line of work in the media world today, the line of work which really made your name around the world was as a magazine editor, with tatler, with vanity fair, with the new yorker, talk and others. do you think the role

you played...? i saw another media outlet calling you an imperial editor the other day. but the grand editors of the '80s and '90s in particular in magazines, do you think that role can still exist as it did? frankly, i am a great believer in strong gatekeepers, and i think the things that are doing well do have the strong gatekeepers. i mean, look at the atlantic magazine in america, where jeffrey goldberg, he's revived the atlantic by being a great editor. and he's quite imperial, i think, actually. inevitably, as a woman, i'm going to get called a diva. i think that i just had strong taste, and i think people of strong taste are valuable everywhere, whether it's at film studios or whatever. it's not an era where those gatekeepers are particularly empowered, which is the problem. but i think in places that they are, significantly, the outlet does better. and do you think the physical magazine is a cultural force at the moment? well, look, i have to say, as someone who absolutely loves print and magazines, i really don't subscribe to really any. hmm. i read everything

on my phone. there's a couple i subscribe to. funnily enough, i subscribed to the new statesman and the spectator here because i actually love that, strangely, sort of... i don't know, it's a kind of very simple format. but the old days of, like, the big glossy magazine with the scoop, etc, i mean, unfortunately, it all changed from the moment when you published the story online first. if they've all gone online first, why are you going to the newsstand? i wondered, tina, if i could ask you, we're journalists here, we love investigations. they're the lifeblood of journalism and they are very costly. i wonder whether you think the substack model is a threat, if you like, to the type of investigations that you might want to celebrate. i don't think they're a threat, but i think it's much harder to do those things without institutional structure. and it's fashionable to say legacy media is dead. i don't actually think that's true. my partner at truth tellers is reuters news. i mean, they do phenomenal investigations. they just won the pulitzer for their huge seven-part fentanyl story. it would've been impossible, really,

to do that as a lone wolf. you need lawyers, you need a team, you need people to contact. it's just not possible to do that at the moment, i think, on a platform like substack, which is much more about voices. but i want to see both things survive and i also do think that it's great to do these big, seven-part investigations and so on, but you also have to make sure people are reading you. so i think we've all got to be very multi-platform now in making sure that we have other ways to get our stories out. and i wonder how we compare the types of editorial and legal checks that an established media organisation would go through and what substack does, because, chris, in the latter part of last year, and, of course, you'll be aware, there was an investigation in the atlantic which turned up, and i quote, "scores of white supremacist, "neo-confederate and explicitly nazi newsletters "on substack." you are clearly a quite different media organisation to established news media. but what checks do you have? i would say we're not even

a media organisation at all. substack is a platform. it's a place where anybody can come and publish. we actually take quite a broad view of what's allowed on substack. we started the company with a pretty firm belief in the freedom of the press and freedom of speech. and so we take... we do have a set of content guidelines that we use that are quite narrowly construed. and so there's a lot of stuff on substack... you know, we don't try to set tight editorial rules for what people can say or publish. i know what my husband, harry evans, thought. he thought that platforms should actually be responsible for the publishing that they do. platforms say their platforms are not publishing entities, so chris's answer was very much what all of the digital platforms will say. what do you think of that distinction? i think, myself, that in many places, it's just gone so too far that it's poisoning the culture, actually. and i guess if the quality material is so much louder at substack, that's a very good thing. there are other platforms

where the dross and the vitriol and the lies are what sort of define it. i certainly don't feel that about substack. so i think of all the platforms out there right now, substack is far more defined by the quality than it is by the stuff that inevitably is going to get on with those kind of wide parameters. but how do you moderate, then? or is your view pretty much anything goes on our...? our view is, if people want to sign up for your substack and get writing from you, the bar that you have to cross before i'm going to come and intervene is very high. it exists. there is a bar. it's sort of hate speech, is it? we have a policy, but it's deliberately like... there's a lot of things on substack, no matter your persuasion, that you will disagree with. the point is that on your substack, you are the editor. it is self-publishing. it's self-publishing. i'm not stepping in and saying, "oh, no, you've got this wrong," or "i think..." you know, any editorial perspective. it's not because i don't think

that's a valuable thing to do. it's not cos i don't believe in the power of editing or believe in all of these same principles. substack exists to provide a different thing than that. and one thing i did want to ask as well, your husband, sir harry evans, was so committed to local journalism, and i wonder whether you do see the necessary business models now to support local journalism, cos i don't think substack is that. there is a large amount of good local journalism on substack. i think that local journalism and the news deserts that have been created when they've collapsed is extraordinarily dangerous, which i think has greatly added to the partisanship, particularly in the us, because... the thing about local news outlets is that they're also community building. you get to know your local council, you get to know the people in your community as well as, of course, exposing the malfeasance of town hall or whatever it is that you want to expose. so it's a terrible lack when it's not there. but we are seeing some very good local outlets. you've got things like the mill in england, by joshi herrmann's outfit,

which is now in six cities, and it's remarkable what he started. let's take that as an example, though, because the mill was on substack and has moved on to another platform called ghost. and based on what the mill has said, there wasn't any great falling out, but one of the reasons they went to ghost was simply that they were giving quite a lot of their income to substack. so i wonder, do you offer a sliding scale of the cut that you take, depending on the type of organisation or individual you're dealing with, chris? it's worth calling out... this is actually one of the great things about substack, is that you own your connection with your audience, and so you have subscribers on substack. we hope you stay forever. we think you will. but if you ever, for whatever reason, think, "hey, i'm going to go do something else, "i'm going to use a different platform," you can actually bring them with you. you can take your list? you can take your list with you. there's no lock-in. if you're a journalist, if you're any kind of... you have subscribers, they're yours, they're not ours. i'm actually amazed at the quality of my subscribers. and i have to tell you that one of the main reasons in the end that i said yes - you asked me about coming - was that, was the fact that i knew this was now going to be my audience,

so that, like, if i write a book