You didn’t know this about Tina Brown Daily Beast

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Brown, Marks and Edward Felsenthal, the former WSJ deputy managing editor who has been working with Brown from the beginning, talked me through a front page of The Daily Beast as they prepared for the launch but the actual site wasn’t available for a preview.

I’ve come to feel word of mouth is reshaping media and culture and we’re building a site where the rationale is word of mouth, the word of mouth of people we feel are interesting and feel have something to say and offer and know something.

Brown, Marks and Edward Felsenthal, the former WSJ deputy managing editor who has been working with Brown from the beginning, talked me through a front page of The Daily Beast as they prepared for the launch but the actual site wasn’t available for a preview.

Tina Brown has worked in the US for more than two decades, since taking the helm of Vanity Fair in 1984; and she’s now attempting to reinvent herself for the internet.

By now, anyone who’s been paying attention knows that Tina Brown’s online project with Barry Diller’s backing is called The Daily Beast after the paper in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop.

Edward Felsenthal, our executive editor, came from the Wall Street Journal, as did our managing editor, Jane Spencer.

Her forthcoming news site, backed by old patron Barry Diller of IAC, is to be dubbed The Daily Beast, after the shameless tabloid of Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel Scoop.

And I’m surrounded by some talented web experts, including our general manager Caroline Marks, who was in charge of social media at Comcast, our site developers Code and Theory, and Michael Jackson and Nick Lehman of IAC.

What I’ve always tried to do with the magazines I’ve edited is my sensibility responding to the zeitgeist out there and picking what I think’s interesting.

I’ve come to feel word of mouth is reshaping media and culture and we’re building a site where the rationale is word of mouth, the word of mouth of people we feel are interesting and feel have something to say and offer and know something.

He has wanted to launch a site like this for a while and for me it makes total sense to have the expertise and the muscle of his company behind us.

One of the great agonies of magazines is it takes so damn long.

What I’ve always tried to do with the magazines I’ve edited is my sensibility responding to the zeitgeist out there and picking what I think is interesting.

It just takes forever to get a magazine out and, once it is out, I remember with monthlies, you’d publish your first issue and almost within hours of getting it out and the first response, you knew exactly how you wanted to tweak it and do things and change it and make it different and better but you were already halfway to press with the next issue so it was really sort of three months before you could change it.

It just takes forever to get a magazine out and, once it is out, I remember with monthlies, you’d publish your first issue and almost within hours of getting it out and the first response, you knew exactly how you wanted to tweak it and do things and change it and make it different and better but you were already halfway to press with the next issue so it was really sort of three months before you could change it.

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.

As for the advertising trajectory, “This is a business unit for IAC but it’s also nice to be a start-up within a corporate environment.

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.

I can’t yet say whether the content measures up but at first look, The Daily Beast reflects Brown’s experience as editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Tatler and founder/editor of short-lived Talk: culture mixed with news of the day, quick hits and deeper dives, bold-faced names blended with writers known and not-so-known.

As for the advertising trajectory, “This is a business unit for IAC but it’s also nice to be a start-up within a corporate environment.

I’ve come to feel word of mouth is reshaping media and culture and we’re building a site where the rationale is word of mouth, the word of mouth of people we feel are interesting and feel have something to say and offer and know something.

In some ways, it’s that high-low mix that I’ve liked to do at Vanity Fair and everywhere I’ve gone really, where the visual presentation is exciting and enticing and the content is smart and well-written and upscale.”

Soft launch: Development truly got underway in July and the plan all along has been to use the soft launch as another stage in that.

As for the advertising trajectory, “This is a business unit for IAC but it’s also nice to be a start-up within a corporate environment.

And we freshen the stream with a good helping of our own original content from a wonderfully diverse group of contributors … satirist Christopher Buckley, historian Sean Wilentz, former McCain adviser Mark McKinnon, Project Runway’s Laura Bennett, the former editor of Al-Hayat Salameh Nematt, Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg, Nick Ciarelli who founded Think Secret, and many others.

One assumes that Liz Smith forgot the sneak peek of the website was supposed to be for her eyes only—though Tina Brown can hardly complain about Smith’s discretion, having pressured the ancient New York Post gossip writer to come out as a lesbian for an early issue of Talk.

When I asked if she was really going to blog, she played it down: “I’m going to be writing regularly for the site.

But the business model is advertising and GM Caroline Marks stresses that it’s a business unit for IAC.

No doubt The Daily Beast will invite comparisons to the newspaper of Waugh’s novel; already Liz Smith compares the IAC mogul backing Tina Brown to a character in Scoop, proprietor Lord Copper; and there will be easy jokes to make whenever Brown’s news site makes an error or hypes a story.