Six months after reports started circulating on the web, October 6 saw the publication of Tina Brown’s latest venture, The Daily Beast.
Brown is, of course, the legendary editor who modernised and turned around the fortunes of The Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker before her highly-regarded but financially unsuccessful self-started glossy monthly Talk Magazine bit the dust.
The big break between The Daily Beast and Ms Brown’s previous escapades is that, instead of being a print offering, it’s a website.
On the face of it, it’s a bit like Drudge or The Huffington Post in that that aggregates news from other sources. The big difference between the Beast - which is named after the newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop - and the others is that, in Ms Brown’s words:
“The Daily Beast doesn’t aggregate. It sifts, sorts, and curates. We’re as much about what’s not there as what is. And we freshen the stream with a good helping of our own original content from a wonderfully diverse group of contributors…”
So it’s a filter and an aggregator.
There’s an interesting Q&A on the site which seeks to reassure readers that Ms Brown’s credentials in print translate perfectly well to the web and it must be said that, if the quality of her personal blog on the recent McCain/Obama TV face-off is anything to go by, the Beast will be a bookmark must, if only for the inciteful quality of the journalism alone.
Here’s the site: www.thedailybeast.com
Let me know what you think.