Why does the Post continue to employ Tina Brown? That’s what one reader asked us and it’s an interesting question.

Ah, Tina Brown. Her background is riddled with both praise and scorn — her resume boasts a controversial reinvention of the New Yorker, the failed Talk magazine under her belt, and regularly bores Gawker’s Henry the Intern to tears with her current “Topic A With Tina Brown” on CNBC — and most of the nation’s population barely knows the woman from our great-aunt Sally. Brown’s status as a media “it” girl, however, endures, and boy does it baffle DCist. How has this English-born New Yorker so entrenched herself into our Washington Post Style section.

Tina Brown entered the Post scene at the beginning of what DCist notes as the paper’s “hip and fun” transition. The Post’s leaders claimed at Brown’s launch in fall 2003 that the NYC-based columnist would bring the paper some “sparkle” with “glittery tales from New York and Los Angeles.” Isn’t it nice to know that the “local” paper thinks our city is a dull, watered-down version of its flashier brethren? So much so that they imported a Style columnist to brighten our world?