Business

MAG-NIFICENCE

Tina Brown, riding high as the best-selling author of “The Diana Chronicles” about the Princess of Wales, can add another honor to her resume: she is being named to the Magazine Editors Hall of Fame today.

For Brown, the honor from the American Society of Magazine Editors is likely to re-ignite interest in her return to the magazine industry.

Brown’s career has had its wild ups and downs.

In 1979, she took over her first magazine, Britain’s Tattler, when she was only 25. Circulation increased 300 percent over the next five years and Condé Nast bought it.

Her last magazine, Talk, launched in 1999 with a spectacular party at the Statue of Liberty, but then crashed and burned 2½ years later after blowing through $54 million of its backers’ money.

In between, she saved Vanity Fair and revitalized the New Yorker.

Critics point out that neither of those magazines made any money while she ran them, but most acknowledge that she created a template for successors to build on, while bringing a sense of urgency that earned her the nickname the “Queen of Buzz.”

“Tina Brown has been a reigning force in popular culture ever since she became a journalist in 1973,” Marlene Kahan, executive director of ASME, said in announcing the award.

“By the time she crossed the pond to the U.S. in the early ’80s, she was well on her way to becoming one of the most visible and talked-about editors in the county,” Kahan said.

Brown also had a way of elevating sex and transforming down-market appeal into high art, such as when she ran Annie Leibovitz’s photo of a nude and pregnant Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair in August 1991, which for years held the record as the best-selling cover of the magazine.

She also shook up The New Yorker and in the process added a stable of writers including Jeffrey Toobin, Ken Auletta, Malcolm Gladwell, Hendrik Hertzberg and the man who eventually succeeded her at the helm, David Remnick.

Meanwhile, Jack Kliger, president and CEO of Hachette Filipacchi Media and earlier a veteran executive at Condé Nast, is being named the recipient of the Henry Johnson Fisher Award, the top business award from the Magazine Publishers of America.

For Kliger, the honor is likely to cap a distinguished career in publishing that began at the Village Voice in 1973 and included Parade from 1997 to 1999 and Condé Nast from 1985 to 1997.

The awards will be presented at a gala luncheon at Gotham Hall in New York City on Jan. 30.

keith.kelly@nypost.com