Bald Vanity Fair media columnist Michael Wolff isn't afraid to be asked the tough questions. That's why 10 lucky winners will be pulled from the Internet to ask Michael Wolff questions about media, life, and his new biography on media mogul Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News. But not in person, natch. Wolff will be answering the questions online, as well. New Media!
Then again, it's Wolff himself who will be picking which questions to answer, so you know that at least nine of them are going to be "Why is Tina Brown such a bitch?"
To enter your question to Wolff, go here.
I'm loving the party!" said Tina Brown last night at her belated Daily Beast launch party, "I'm loving all the kids who write for us. It's a time to celebrate."
Brown also said she "would never go back to print," despite the fact that when her Talk launched in 1999, it was on Liberty Island and Madonna was there, while Daily Beast's launch held its event in the back of Pop Burgers.
Oh well, who doesn't like to play the pauper every once in awhile? And Pop Burgers is no Burger King…though it's no Liberty Island, either.
And to tell the truth, most of those young bloggers would write for the site in exchange for a hot meal on Brown's dime anyway.
The highly anticipated editors-in-chief luncheon that happens for the Condé Nast staff at the Four Seasons every year has just been…*gasp*…canceled. Mon dieu!
Says a spokesperson, "We are going to forgo it this year. We think it is in keeping with the times." Um, right, but whatever happened to the magazine industry's "Let them eat cake?" Guess it wouldn't look right with the fall of Men's Vogue and the scale backs at Portfolio.
Poor Si! Poor Keith Kelly who is kept in business at the Post writing about high profile/closed door media events like this. And poor anyone who thought they would be able to tell where they stand with the Newhouse clan, which apparently determines the seating arrangements at the Christmas bash.
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It's been less than a month (barely) since Tina Brown launched Daily Beast, and already it is trouncing the competition. Bitter grapes for Michael Wolff, whose own Newser is getting beat in web traffic by Brown's site, and who has publicly said some notsonice things about the British news mogul.
"I have to say I think I'd be handicapped if I was linked to a magazine," she said at one point. And later, she elaborated, "In my month's experience editing The Daily Beast, I am so excited by it, so enthralled by it, so kind of invigorated by it that it does make me realize the great opportunities of this digital world. And I have to say I would hate to have to be in the magazine world right now. It's a really tough time to be a magazine editor, trying to compete, in a sense with that pace and that exhilaration and the multimedia nature [of the web]."
-Tina Brown, exercising the old ghosts of her Talk magazine during the EconWomen's conference
A lot of comparison has been made of the similarities between the blogger free-for-all, The Huffington Post, and newly minted "political salon" of The Daily Beast. And you can see why: both are run by similarly-aged, blonde (one strawberry) editrixes, who were friends back in London town, both appeal to that elite liberal media sensibilities that John McCain and the GOP rails against so frequently, and both (the women and the sites) market in the type of smug, self-selection of writers who enjoy adding the word "blogger" after their already myriad of other job titles. Oh, and they are indebted to Barry Diller: Brown, because he helped finance TDB, and Huffington because she and Barry partnered together under some weird arrangement to get the political humor site 23/6 off the ground and into semi-funny territory.
But given all their similarities, surely there is some line to draw in the sand. CONTINUED »
Conrad Black: Baron, Indicted criminal frauder…blogger? Sure, why not. The guy who was once the third biggest newspaper owner in the world, and who is now serving time in federal prison in Florida, thinks that John McCain fumbled with the potentially election-turning baillout bill.
And though most people don't care what incarcerated prisoners think of the political race, Tina Brown and her crew over The Daily Beast are going to give Black some extra fifteen minutes, maybe in the hopes that when he's sprung out of jail, he'll be a regular contributor to the site:
Sure, everyone Hearst might be cutting down left and right, and even the most renowned blogs are feeling the sting of a not-so-great period of American history. But Arianna-wannabe Tina Brown? Couldn't be more pleased with the way things are going:
There's such a depression in the mainstream-media world, whether it's publishing or network television or magazines, and everybody's kind of glum, and feeling they're kind of being outpaced. It's all about budget cuts. From my point of view and our point of view here, it's exciting to be in a situation where you feel the only way to go is up, that it's about finding an audience fast, and catering to that audience fast. I love being able to adapt.
Guess that's why the front page of her online aggregator/original content provider is looking so cheery today:
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When you are a high-profile writer working on a new book, one part of the publicity machine — besides a book tour and leaking juicy quotes to Page Six — is placing an excerpt of your manuscript in a magazine as high-profile as your name. Much of Vanity Fair's feature well is reserved for crap like this. Even Entertainment Weekly participates, this week running an excerpt from Eminem's new book (complete with childhood photos, awww!). Sad, then, for Sharon Waxman. She's the former NYT Hollywood reporter and current ignoramus who's been reduced to Nikki Finke also-ran on Waxword, her attempt to be a Hollywood industry insider reporter in a niche that just wants her out. Waxman is also gearing up to launch The Wrap News, a HuffPo-y sort of vehicle for, yep, Hollywood insider news. But Waxman is also an accomplished author. Her latest book is Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World. It even has an accompanying website! Except now that the book is about to hit stores (Oct. 28), Waxman should be out there promoting the hell out of the thing. Instead, she's only managed to copy/paste her work into this month's fleeting media obsession. CONTINUED »
Hope you all have been reading up on Tina Brown/Barry Diller's new Huffpost-style aggregator-slash-news source The Daily Beast. Because unfamiliarity with Brown at this point is almost (exactly) like saying you didn't know who Arianna was five years ago: it is just not done in polite media circles.
But what you may not know is how deeply entrenched Tina and her famous friends are submerged in each other's works and how many fingers/pies there are to go around. For example: Tina's husband Harry Evans is one of those vague editor-at-large deals at The Week magazine, run by Felix Dennis.
So does Brown link to The Week on her site? No, that would be tacky. Instead, she has friend/famous person Sheryl Crow submit a soundbite to her Buzz Board section, "The Week magazine has been a necessity for me in keeping up with what is going on in the world of politics, news, and, of course, the odd gossip."
Ooh, that saucy minx. First Tina rips off a Philly rag's logo, and now she is practicing the media equivalent of insider trading? Next week: The Daily Beast gets questioned by Homeland Security for social espionage, surely. How else are they going to keep their numbers up? CONTINUED »
Tina Brown's Daily Beast has been up for less than a week, and yet already it is mired in controversy. Well, perhaps mired is the wrong word: Some blogs are noticing the similarities between the logo from Brown and Barry Diller's site, and the masthead for one of Philadelphia's papers, The Daily News.
After a couple rounds of speculation on the web, Philadelphia Newspapers LLC issued a cease-and-desist letter to The Daily Beast. Reached for comment, Tina Brown was all, "What's a Philadelphia?"
The cease-and-desist contains this gem, "Our readers could easily be duped into thinking that your Web site is somehow affiliated" with the Daily News," as if it were a bad thing to have one of approximately four city papers confused for a nationally recognized media blog.
In a spiked profile for a women's magazine, which was repurposed for content on Tina Brown's The Daily Best, Jennifer Lopez insisted she wasn't a Scientologist, but also: she hates psychologists and pills that help with anxiety. Which, you know, are absolutely not themes of Scientology! There was plenty of speculation, then, about which magazine spiked the story — almost certainly to please The Jennifer — and now, an answer. It was Robbie Myers' Elle who kicked reporter Kevin Sessums off the story after his first interview got too personal; that is, Lopez admitted to having a nervous breakdown in her trailer. Eek! And now that Brown published the material Sessums walked away with? "We're very unhappy about it, and think it was poor judgment on his part. As long as we have represented Jennifer, we have never heard her refer to having a breakdown of any sort."
From left to right: Former MS-omething Tucker Carlson, Bill Clinton, Think Secret's Nicholas Ciarelli, Infidel and Jewel of Medina author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, CNN's Christiane Amanpour, Quadrangle Group's Steven Rattner.
Yes yes, Tina Brown's new website The Daily Beast is alive and kicking and slick and already promoting its creator. But while the site asks visitors to "Read This, Not That," we couldn't get past many of the words because … there are so many beautiful people writing for this site! Actually, that's not entirely true — some of them aren't generally inclined to be pretty people, but somehow, through the magic of skilled headshot photographers, a talented art director, and Photoshop, The Daily Beast cast a bevy of beauties who've never looked younger, more well rested, nor pumped full of Botox in their lives.
Okay, we did find one contributor not looking his best: CONTINUED »
Tina Brown and Barry Diller's blogger collaboration, The Daily Beast, launched this weekend. You guys remember Tina Brown right? She looks just like Jane Lynch and was the editor who helmed all the redesigns for the snazzier new Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. And Barry Diller is like the gay Rupert Murdoch who controls IAC (not AIG).
So far, the site works more as a news aggregator than an original content source, but some big names have already signed for the Huffpost-esque site. That explains why Diller, who financed the site, was so keen on snuggling up with Arianna and spending millions for their joint comedy site 23/6. Avoiding bad blood isn't cheap, esp. if you want a such a gracious soundbite from Queen Huffington:
Bonnie Fuller and Tina Brown aren't the only ladies of the media industry rolling out new web projects. So, too, is NYT and WaPo scribe Sharon Waxman, currently blogging Hollywood at Waxword, a Deadline Hollywood-esque site punched up with Waxman's analysis.
Now flush with $500k in funding, Waxman in January will launch The Wrap News, a gossip-something-or-other website that will join the 947,000 other URLs doing the same thing.
In sharing the news of Waxman's new venture, sex obsessed media columnist Jon Friedman points to Waxman's recent story about The Hollywood Reporter being up for sale. Of course, Waxman, seen here getting strangled by Quentin Tarantino, was six months late to the story — Jossip was the first to connect the dots. In February. Here's hoping her Hollywood headlines will have a shorter timeline.
Launching in the fall, Tina Brown's upcoming news website The Daily Beast may fail not because she runs over budget with Barry Diller's cash, but because her site doesn't lean to either the right or left, but up. As in upscale. [LAT]
Tina Brown's upcoming news aggregator website, fronted by Barry Diller, will be called The Daily Beast. That Ms. Brown's titling includes the word "beast" is not meant to be taken with irony. It's also a sign that she's immediately setting herself up to be behind the times: The new news cycle churns, at the very least, once every 60 minutes. Usually faster. And Brown's eyes look tired.
Tina Brown and Barry Diller will finally be sharing a bed. The Princess Di biographer and the vindicated IAC chief are teaming on a news aggregator website, where there will be "no ideological stance" on the glorified RSS feed.
Former WSJ deputy managing editor Edward Felsenthal will lead things off (given that other high-profile types, including business scribes at the Times, turned down offers).
But Tina isn't saying much about what the site will actually do, let alone when it'll launch. In the meantime, there will always be The Huffington Post, Brijit, Newser, and a slew of others already doing whatever it is Diller thinks will rescue his company.
THE CLINTONS ARE INTERESTING Tina Brown is writing a biography on the Clintons. Awesome, because we were just thinking we don't know anything about those two. [AP]
SHOWTIME DIDN'T WANT HER "The amazing Tina Brown is in a newly struck, first-look deal to bring projects and story ideas to HBO, the TV network that also seems to understand "buzz" and great storytelling versus the hackneyed stuff that is on the networks." [Liz Smith]
Editorial Director
