The Daily Beast is a new website along the lines of The Huffington Post from a content standpoint and started by long-time magazine editor Tina Brown and with an investment by Barry Diller. The rumor has been that $18 million was invested in the site and that the company was burning through $1 million or so in a month. Here in the video, Brown dispells those rumors.
In all, The Daily Beast is certainly an interesting "go" in that Brown is not going to have a set of unpaid bloggers, as The Huff Post does, but all paid writers, In other words a news and content staff.
I think that's a terrible idea because it places a high cost template in the business model and causes a higher level of revenue to be reached. Translation: a constant burn rate. But what's even more alarming to me is this staff photo we see: where the hell's the staff diversity?
Has Tina ever heard of Black folks at all? Indeed, she wasn't a fan of President-Elect Barack Obama, but one of those who knee-jerk pointed to the "media bias against Hillary Clinton " while walking ignorantly past the dark racism that Obama faced during the campaign.
Regardless, assembling an almost-all-white (one Indian) news staff in an era that prizes diversity is massively irresponsible.
Partly as a result of this "one-think", The Daily Beast is woefully devoid of any original content at present. It's a cross between the online version of The New York Daily News, and The Huffington Post. If "news is advertising" as Brown says in the video, The Beast has terrible ad content.
For some reason I can see this lasting two or three years -- tops. That's not because of the staffing, but the total package. There's nothing original here.
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