"First of all, Tina Brown's magazine is not doing well at all," he said in a press conference on Friday, WWD reports. "She is dying [professionally]. I'm sorry for Tina Brown, who was such a success at Vanity Fair, to go down with a shitty little paper like this. I'm sorry."
Brown shrugged off Lagerfeld's comments, responding with a Tweet: "The Kaiser doth protest too much! 'Diet issue?' Newsweek ads up 27 percent for Q1."
Newsweek also offered an official statement, defending its recent success.
"In the past year since Tina Brown took over as editor-in-chief of Newsweek, newsstand sales have increased 30 per cent year-on-year; advertising pages have seen a 27 per cent increase for the first quarter of 2012; we have over 2.2 million people engaged in our social media communities and, perhaps the most telling indicator of the renewed vitality of Newsweek, subscription renewals - in a consistent state of decline since 2005 - rose by 3 per cent last year," a spokesperson for the publication told Stylelist.
