Tina Brown says she picked The Daily Beast as the name of her just launched news aggregator Website because it was the name of the newspaper in her all-time favorite novel, a Fleet Street satire called Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh.
But there’s another reason too. As any reporter who’s worked on daily deadlines knows, the news business is all about getting the next story, and the next, and the next, in other words, “feeding the beast.”
The Daily Beast has been building buzz since early summer and is owned by Barry Diller’s Internet enterprise, InterActive Corp. The e-zine, which launched Oct. 6, blends the day’s best news on politics, Wall Street, Hollywood, international affairs and current events from top magazines, newspapers and blogs and packages them with kicky intros and a reader-friendly layout with lots of black, red and white space. DB doesn’t aggregate the news as much as “sifts, sorts and curates,” says Brown in this cheeky Q & A.
What’s the difference between DB and already established sites like the Huffington Post, Gawker and TMZ that play in that sandbox? “Sensibility,” Brown says in the Q & A. Whatever that means. Brown, a Brit who previously was editor in chief at Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Talk, a short-lived tabloid style glossy, has assembled a gaggle of high-level bloggers as another way of going above and beyond. The group includes Kevin Sessums, whose current piece on Jennifer Lopez was apparently dropped from a big-name magazine when the star objected to seeing some of her own comments in print, and Project Runway star and mother of six Laura Bennett, an unapologetic “bad mommy” who blogs about her laissez-faire child-rearing techniques.
Does the world really need another place to read about celebrities and Wall Street? Only time will tell whether this Beast has teeth, or will slowly slink off into oblivion.