Tina Brown, on relaunching Newsweek with The Daily Beast

Read a little. Learn a lot. • Tightly-written news, views and stuff • Follow us on Twitter • Be a Facebook Fan • Tumble us!

Ironically, it was living in The Daily Beast’s fast and furious news cycle for the past two years that revealed to me what a newsmagazine can bring to the table when it’s no longer chasing yesterday’s story. It’s about filling the gaps left when a story has seemingly passed, or resetting the agenda, or coming up with an insight or synthesis that connects the crackling, confusing digital dots.
Tina Brown • Explaining in her redesign-launching letter what Newsweek’s relaunch means. She’s absolutely right, really – her time with The Daily Beast makes her pretty much the perfect person to play the role of editor of a newsmagazine in 2011. She can take the lessons from the Beast and build a shared vision between two entities which are designed to handle different parts of the media pie. We wish her the best. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

28 Feb 2011 08:36

As far as political Punditry goes, this is like LeBron James leaving the Cavs. Andrew Sullivan, who in our opinion wrote the script on what a good political site is supposed to be, is moving. This time, he’s taking “The Daily Dish” from The Atlantic (whose fortunes improved in large part thanks to his site) to The Daily Beast, and will contribute to Newsweek to boot. Andy’s grown a bit more liberal over the years – though he’ll never admit it to your face – but he’s still an essential read nonetheless. While Andy is sad about leaving a company that he helped lead to their first year of profitability in ages, “The chance to be part of a whole new experiment in online and print journalism, in the Daily Beast and Newsweek adventure, is just too fascinating and exciting a challenge to pass up.” Right now, though, we admit to having that lump in our throat knowing that our favorite team just lost its best player to the Miami Heat. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

Married people disagree all the time. One of them walks out of the room and says, ‘Never talk to me again.’ Then they sleep it off and one sends the other flowers. We realized that there was much more that connected us than separated us.
Newsweek owner Sidney Harman • Explaining the dynamic between the ownership of his Newsweek and that of the Barry Diller-owned Daily Beast. One anonymous source described the potential failure of the collaboration being “like a bad Nora Ephron movie.” Will the collaboration turn out like “Sleepless in Seattle,” “You’ve Got Mail,” or “Bewitched”? All we know is that we’ll have what they’re having. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

$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 • 0 Comments • Permalink