Posted on 11/13/2010 3:31:49 AM PST by abb
Barry Diller, who has spent the better part of a decade amassing a collection of Internet companies — a search engine here, a dating Web site there — has figured out how to help make the Internet work a little better for him. He is going into the magazine business.
Mr. Diller, whose IAC/InterActiveCorp owns the news and commentary site The Daily Beast, agreed this week to enter into a 50-50 venture that would pair it with Newsweek.
snip
Mr. Diller had more than a few good reasons to think twice about not being too territorial when it came to sharing control with Mr. Harman. Starting his own print version of The Daily Beast would be costly. Newsweek had a brand and all the infrastructure in place needed to go to print on Day 1.
Plus, by rolling Newsweek.com into The Daily Beast, they could hope to absorb some of the nearly five million unique visitors Newsweek clocks each month. The Daily Beast’s traffic growth has slowed lately, though it is up tenfold to more than two million a month since the site made its debut in October 2008, according to comScore.
Newsweek.com will cease to exist after the merger, and anyone who types the URL into their browser will be redirected to TheDailyBeast.com, Mr. Colvin said.
The merger is likely to come with other forms of consolidation. One of the main reasons the merger appealed to Mr. Diller and Mr. Harman was that combining the newsrooms and business sides would allow them to reduce staffing. When asked about possible job cuts on Friday, Ms. Brown said, “We’re going to have to look at the whole business model, the whole editorial model, and we’ll have to make our assessments.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“Mr. Diller became increasingly enamored with the idea of idea of coupling his two-year-old start-up with one of the most established brands in print journalism.”
So, what do you suppose was the most established brand of buggy whip when they quit making them? Just asking.
“We realized that there was much more that connected us than separated us.”
Indeed. Both are losing money hand over fist from business models that don’t work.
Was the arrow ever up for President Bush during his eight years in office?
“Newsweek.com will cease to exist after the merger, and anyone who types the URL into their browser will be redirected to TheDailyBeast.com, Mr. Colvin said. ... by rolling Newsweek.com into The Daily Beast, they could hope to absorb some of the nearly five million unique visitors Newsweek clocks each month. ... The Daily Beast’s traffic growth has slowed ... to more than two million a month”
Oh yeah, that’s gonna work out real well. You think more than a few hundred of the old folks that might go to newsweek.com are really gonna love being redirected to a web site called Daily Beast? There’s a reason there’s only two million hits a month at Daily Beast. And you know what the really weird thing is about all of this? Why are they nuking newsweek.com if the brand is “one of the most established brands in print journalism.”?
Was the arrow ever up for President Bush during his eight years in office?You know better than that. The only shot Bush has at an up arrow is the day he dies.
http://www.slate.com/id/2274733/pagenum/all/
Unsolicited Advice for Tina Brown
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-12/daily-beast-merges-with-newsweek-tina-brown-sidney-harman-and-barry-diller-weigh-in-/full/
As The Daily Beast and Newsweek combine forces, Editor in Chief Tina Brown, Barry Diller, and Sidney Harman on how the deal came together and reimagining the newsmagazine.
The slate story is interesting because it assumes Newsweek will continue as a printed publication. Somehow I don’t see that as likely, especially if newsweek.com is being nuked.
Most likely I would think Diller imagines that a new printed publication titled “The Daily Beast” is what’s going to happen in place of print-publising Newsweek. Is this really why Harman bought Newsweek? So he could see it’s name completely discarded and The Daily Beast arise in it’s place? I really don’t think so.
If there really is a 50-50 control between Harman and Diller, it’s going to be interesting to see what kind of tug-of-war results, because I suspect that Diller and Harman have wildly different notions about the future. I also suspect that Diller totally snookered Harman in this whole deal. Diller may have also built in a tie-breaker that favors his 50-50 side of things.
(BTW, it’s also hilarious about how much importance this fool Jack Shafer assigns to this story, like all the regular folks are just waiting with bated breath as to what happens to Tina Brown, Newsweek, and The Daily Beast. Most of the regular folks have never heard of Tina Brown and the Daily Beast, and are barely aware of Newsweek.)
As savvy as Diller is, I think he is still stalled in the 90’s thinking that “we will print/post it and they will come and read it.”
With so many choices now available for the rest of us, Tina Brown snark has a very limited audience.
It’s all about the distribution system, and that’s all its ever been about.
“It’s all about the distribution system, and that’s all its ever been about.”
Sure. Used brontosaurus-sized printing plants are now a dime-a-dozen, while a distribution system like Newsweek’s would be prohibitively expensive to build from scratch, but exactly what printed material do they expect to distribute for a profit?
Perhaps Diller thinks the residual ‘brand value’ of Newsweek will carry the thing for a while. It did at one time have a decent size readership...
http://www.wwd.com/media-news/fashion-memopad/a-beauty-and-the-beast-3381569?justin=3381569
A Beauty and The Beast
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1011/14/rs.01.html
Interview with Tina Brown, Sidney Harman
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