• $10M the amount The Daily Beast is on track to lose this year; it’s relatively new, so that’s not bad
• $20M the amount Newsweek is on track to lose; it’s been bleeding for a long freaking time
• $1 the amount Sidney Harman spent to buy Newsweek; he also took on all its debt source

• » Is this a deal just to get Tina Brown? It wouldn’t be unprecedented. See, Brown, a longtime magazine editor for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, has the chops to help make Newsweek a success again, and Barry Diller’s Daily Beast, while growing at a nice clip (5 million online readers a month, which means that nowadays, it’s probably read about as widely as Newsweek, which sells 1.6 million print copies – significantly down from just a year ago), probably needs a print component to anchor its Web efforts and ensure profitability. And plus, NBC Universal bought Barry Diller’s USA Network back in 2001 basically to get Diller.

Posted by Ernie Smith • Permalink