The Daily Beast

What are people saying about David Gregory, NBC News' heir presumptive for Tim Russert's job on Meet the Press? Felix Gillette talks to some who say things like, “He’s got great instincts when it comes to what area of stories to probe...I don’t think there’s much of a learning curve when it comes to politics. He knows that world as well as anyone. He gets great stuff out of people" and "He can be an aggressive questioner—as he showed in the White House Press Room. He was a dramatic and good and persistent questioner. And he’s not afraid to be disliked.”

Is Tina Brown "like Schindler, in a skirt-suit"? That's what John Koblin calls her when it comes to bringing laid off writers into her Daily Beast. But what can they hope to be paid? Plus: January Groans: Mags' Lean Month Gets Downright Gaunt.

Can a 26-year-old consultant who took Columbia's Publishing Course and worked for a time at Little, Brown save publishing? Leon Neyfakh meets Eric Wolff, who says, "Truth is, there isn’t a whole lot of reason for a big media company to own a book company unless it wants to be in that business... Corporations generally want growth stories, and there’s no growth in books.”

Plus: Missbehave's new editor... Superstar avatars... Murdoch the Magnificent.

On the day the perennially troubled Radar magazine folded, its editor Maer Roshan got an email from an old friend, Tina Brown, with whom he’d worked at her own sunken ship, Talk.

“Maer my darling, I’m grieving so terribly,” she wrote in her Masterpiece Theatre trill. “I’m running into a meeting, but do nothing either yourself or with your staff until you’ve spoken to us. I will call you as soon as I can.”

Maybe Barry Diller’s mammoth IAC Corporation, with whom Ms. Brown launched her aggregator Web site, the Daily Beast, was prepping a bailout plan for the magazine!

Or was she looking for spiked pieces she could use to add original content to her own online magazine?

These days, Ms.  read more »

"We're having a lot more fun than we did on Liberty Island!" said Tina Brown, the czarina of The Daily Beast, at her Web site's launch party last night in the Meatpacking District.

No, it didn't quite have the extravagance, say, of that 1999 Talk launch party on Liberty Island, where more than 800 movie stars and celebrities—invites went out to everyone from Henry Kissinger to Madonna—mingled and got drunk in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

Well, those were different times.

Ms. Brown's launch party last night was at... Pop Burger on Ninth Avenue. Maybe this is the New Media reality.

At this party, Harvey Weinstein didn't make the guest list, but "Fast Eddie" Felsenthal, the executive editor of The Daily Beast, sure did (and that was his nickname at The Wall Street Journal, we're told!). And instead of nearly a thousand arriving by ferry, this one had a few dozen people who had to take the ACE or the L. Everyone went home by a quarter to nine.

There were free sliders.  read more »

Barely a thousand hours old and The Daily Beast, already has its own mini scandal.

According to a Smoking Gun post headlined Tina Brown In Beastly Hoax, Tina Brown and Barry Diller's Web site ran an article that purported to show concept drawings for Michelle Obama's inaugural gown by Project Runway contestants last week.

The only problem: One of the drawings contributed was fake, a prank done by a Canadian musician named Jay McCarrol mistakenly contacted by the reporter, Hailey Eber, who thought she was emailing with Jay McCarroll, one of the design show's breakout stars. Mr. McCarrol, who is not a fashion designer, had a friend do some sketches which he sent Ms. Eber, in a prank that calls to mind The Baffler's Great Grunge Hoax from 1992, in which a shop owner invented hilariously fake 'grunge' terms which ran as part of a New York Times' article by Rick Marin. The lexicon featured the immortal—and frankly, still viable—phrase, "bloated bag of bloatation," which supposedly meant "drunk."  read more »

Today on The Daily Beast, Tina Brown and Barry Diller's literally hundreds of hours old Web site, Randi Zuckerberg sallies forth a bold, truly shocking statement: It Must Be Stopped: Hipster Lip Dub Videos. (Insert your own exclamation points interspersed with number 1s here.)

This is perhaps the second most powerful statement by the site since last week when The Beast stood athwart tooth-whitening yelling Stop. But this critique, aimed at young people who film themselves and their friends lip-syncing pop songs and post the clips on YouTube and other sites, is somewhat confusing.   read more »

Ana Marie Cox, former Washington Editor of Radar, conducted a long interview with CBS News political analyst-turned-McCain-Palin campaign advisor Nicolle Wallace for Tina Brown and Barry Diller's Web site, The Daily Beast. (The Observer's Felix Gillette spoke with Ms. Wallace earlier this month.)

Early on, Ms. Wallace jokes that she walks her dog, Lily, "in Central Park with a group of wonderful, flaming liberals who I love and I love their dogs," but soon enough, Ms. Cox gets down to some serious questioning:

What are the media lessons people can learn from this election?

I think the networks have re-emerged as the arbiters of what story gets through.  read more »

Sure, it's well past its buzzy first 100 hours, but that doesn't mean there can't be more coverage of Tina Brown and Barry Diller's three-week-old don't- call-it-a-news-aggregator site, The Daily Beast.

In today's New York Times, Tim Arango offers a dual (duel?) profile of Ms. Brown and her aggregating sister-in-arms, Arianna Huffington. (And yesterday's Times Magazine featured an interview with Christopher Buckley by Deborah Solomon, but that was simply to fill a quota since, it had been nearly a week since Mr. Buckley was written about in The Caucus, the 'Style' section, Week in Review or Op-Ed.)  read more »

While we had him on the phone talking about Rupert Murdoch, we thought we'd ask Michael Wolff what he thought of The Daily Beast, the new Web site from Tina Brown that is in plain competition with Newser.com, the news aggregator site that Mr. Wolff started last year.

Mr. Wolff first shared his thoughts on The Daily Beast back in April, when he told Gawker that he didn't expect much out of Ms. Brown because last he'd heard she didn't know how to check her email.

He was no gentler today.

"I think it's preposterous," Mr. Wolff said.  read more »

Rich Lowry, editor of The National Review, has responded to Christopher Buckley's announcement on Tina Brown and Barry Diller's Daily Beast that he was "fired," as the story's URL shows, or "sacked," as its headline read until it was recently changed to "Buckley Bows Out of National Review." (Buzz moves fast, and as The Times David Carr wrote roughly 300 hours ago, "Given Ms. Brown’s reputation for frantically changing everything in the final hours of closing every magazine she has edited, perhaps a medium that absorbs — indeed, requires — constant reiteration will suit her.")  read more »

Jim Romenesko—and just about every media site possible—linked to a story by the Philadelphia Daily News' Dan Gross that says his paper's parent company has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Tina Brown and Barry Diller's nearly 200-hour-old Web site The Daily Beast, claiming that its logo is "potentially trademark-infringing" with that of the Daily News.

Mr. Gross quotes the letter (which an unnamed spokesperson for The Daily Beast says was not received) as saying the logo is "virtually identical in shape, color, font and style to our own Daily News logo."

Apparently there's a serious risk that "our readers could easily be duped into thinking that your Web site is somehow affiliated" with the paper.

That seems unlikely because of—to quote Ms. Brown's already famous launch-day Q&A—"Sensibility, darling."  read more »

In a tongue-in-cheek post on The Daily Beast (100+ hours and still going strong!), Christopher Buckley endorses Senator Barack Obama for President.

Writes Mr. Buckley:

Let me be the latest conservative/ libertarian/ whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

Funny, but probably not the best week to make jokes about father's (or grandfather's) cutting kids off.  read more »

On Monday, as you no doubt already know, Tina Brown and Barry Diller launched The Daily Beast, a Web site that promises to "sift" and "curate" the unruly Internet.

Ms. Brown noted in a launch Q&A that her site would not be a boring old news aggregator, since sifting and curating are very different verbs from aggregating. In that Q&A, Ms. Brown trumpeted her new staff, including, "Edward Felsenthal, our executive editor, came from the Wall Street Journal, as did our managing editor, Jane Spencer. Senior editors Bryan Curtis and Nicholas Wapshott came from Slate and the Sun, home page editor Henry Seltzer from USmagazine.  read more »

Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke has weighed in on Tina Brown and Barry Diller's newly-launched Web site, The Daily Beast.

Ms. Finke's succinct summation of the site calls to mind the scene in This is Spinal Tap in which director Marty DeBergi recites a "merely a two-word review" of the band's album Shark Sandwich.

It should be noted Ms. Finke called The Huffington Post, "the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable. Her blog is such a bomb that it’s the movie equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate rolled into one. In magazine terms, it’s the disastrous clone of Tina Brown’s Talk, JFK Jr.’s George or Maer Roshan’s Radar."

So, The Daily Beast might have a chance yet.