The Beast Rises from the Deep
By Ned Resnikoff - Oct 6th, 2008 at 5:03 pmVia Michael Calderone, it looks like journalist Tina Brown is launching a new online news source/news aggregator called The Daily Beast. There isn’t a whole lot of content on there yet, so, unsurprisingly, the most interesting feature is the Q&A with its creator. This response in particular grabbed my attention:
Why should I visit you when there’s already Slate/Drudge/Huffington Post/TPM/Google News and every other magazine and newspaper?
Sensibility, darling.
Anyway, you don’t have to use it instead. Just use it first. I shall certainly continue with my own forays around the web. But we all have only one pair of eyes and ears. We’re hoping that if you like the sensibility The Daily Beast brings to choosing news and opinion then you’ll trust us to be the lens you view it through.
Which doesn’t really tell you much of anything about what will differentiate the Beast from any of a hundred preexisting new media ventures. I’d wager that’s a function of Brown’s admitted inexperience with the web. But I do have high hopes that Brown’s site will eventually carve itself a niche in the blogosphere, mostly because of what she says here:
One thing I think I do understand about the web is that it morphs with amazing speed. The Daily Beast will evolve before your eyes. We began building our site in mid-July and wanted to put it up ASAP in beta so that its further development could be driven by the interplay between our sensibility and our users’ responses; for example through our Feed The Beast feature.
In other words, the site is still being shaped, and the people shaping it will include its current readers. That’s reason enough for me to stick around and see where this is going.
Tina Brown does deserve credit for presiding over the New Yorker during what is widely believed to be its best period of reporting. But I agree that someone who built her reputation on longform, heavily edited journalism may have trouble adapting to the fast pace of modern journalism. I guess we’ll see if it will become awesome or just a weak replication of HuffPo. I wonder if they at least pay their writers …
October 6th, 2008 at 5:30 pm