They’re both displaced Brits. They’ve been friends for years.
And now they have their own news and opinion websites, one doing very well, the other starting up but making noise.
The New York Times on Monday looked at the interlocking careers and lives of Arianna Huffington, 58, and Tina Brown, 55.
Huffington’s left-leaning The Huffington Post started in May 2005 and had 4.5 million unique visitors last month.
Brown’s The Daily Beast, launched on Oct. 6, is far too young to come near those numbers.
But Brown, the former editor of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and other magazines, is confident there’s an appetite for a website like hers.
Like the Post, her site aggregates the news, offering quick reads. Like Huffington’s site, it also offers blogs and reported stories.
But the Beast, despite its snarly title (a reprise of the newspaper’s name in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop), has a more muted tone than the Post’s. There’s an attempt at balance, with voices from the left, the right and the center.
And Brown puts her taste and judgment front and center, declaring that she’s there to sift, sort and curate (her words) the news.
In that sense, she’s taken on the out-of-favor role of editor as arbiter, someone who can decide without benefit of a focus group.
“We all have only one pair of eyes and ears,” she wrote in a question-and-answer session with herself on the Beast. “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.”
The Beast made a roar almost immediately when Christopher Buckley, the son of conservative icon William F. Buckley, endorsed Barack Obama on Oct. 10.
Buckley’s column led to his departure from The National Review, an exit chronicled on the Beast in the Buckley column of Oct. 14.
Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp has fronted Brown and her website with $18 million, and she’s used some of that to sign up several writers in addition to Buckley.
Her bloggers and/or contributors include Gail Sheehy, Michael Kinsley, Gay Talese and Tucker Carlson.
Also on board are Andrew Morton, who like Brown, is a biographer of Princess Diana, and Sir Harold Evans, Brown’s husband and the legendary former editor of London’s The Sunday Times and other publications.
According to The New York Times, Evans is the key link between Brown and Huffington.
The two women had known each other in the 1970s in England, where Brown was a columnist and Huffington the author of books. But they became close friends in 1979 after Evans paid Huffington more than $300,000 for the serialization rights to her biography of Maria Callas.
The friendship continued after both women moved to the United States, though they have ended up on opposite coasts, Huffington in California, Brown in New York.
Distance hasn’t hurt their friendship. Neither, they say, has the arrival of Brown’s website.
“The competition about us is really made up,” Huffington told the Times. “It’s not like you are going to buy either Time or Newsweek. The nature of what is happening online is so different. You link, you cross-promote.”
Click here to sign up for the Muckety Newsletter
0 Comments
There are no comments yet, be the first by filling in the form below.
Leave a Comment