BeastWeek: Why The Daily Beast Merger With Newsweek Will Fail

BeastWeek, the merger between The Daily Beast and Newsweek that was announced early Friday morning by Tina Brown (in photo with IAC Chairman Barry Diller), who will run the new entity, will fail.

(BTW, it would be nice if Roy Greenslade at The Guardian UK would give me, Zennie Abraham, credit for coming up with the name BeastWeek as applied to the merger, rather than just using it without attribution.  That's not right. Come on, Son!)

This blogger will give it two years, three if the minders are lucky. The primary reason is BeastWeek reflects everything that it wrong with East Coast Old Media, and nothing that reflects the 21st Century tech-oriented approach of New Media.

Reading Howard Kurtz' Daily Beast article called "Inside the New Beast," was both alarming and expected. In reflecting the now-much-told origins of the merger between The Daily Beast and Newsweek, Kurtz focused entirely on the personalities involved, and mentioned nothing - zero, zip, nada - about the media technology and approach that will be used.

This, then, is the problem when a group of people with journalist backgrounds representing the best of Old Media are charged with saving a media brand. Their first focus on them, and that's it. Nothing about the approach. Nothing about reach targets, traffic objectives, or web site experience and usability, and nothing about integrating social media and mobile. In short, nothing about innovations and everything about personalities.  

In short, the habit of East Coast Old Media.

According to Kurtz, Sidney Harman (photo at left), who bought Newsweek for $1 says it will take up to three years to "turn around" Newsweek:

I believe it will take the better part of two or three years to have this own company operating on its own fuel. If that happens I will consider it a significant achievement, and a hell of a good thing for journalism, the magazine, the company’s employees and the United States of America.

If the parties were serious about "turning around" Newsweek, The Daily Beast would have been jettisoned as a name with the Newsweek brand replacing it. Then the print Newsweek would be redesigned to look more like a printed webpage, complete with ads at the top of the page. Video would be the medium emphasized, along with live stream online broadcasts using USTREAM and Qik.com with YouTube for video shows.

Thus, the print publication becomes a way of presenting rich content that's appeared online. Interviews, photos, and events of the week that rapidly play out online become the content for the magazine.

That's the kind of thinking this blogger's looking for. That's what I'm not seeing expressed in the conversation about BeastWeek.

See?

And that's just a taste of the approach I have in mind. But with  Brown, Harman, and Barry Diller, the trio behind the merger, and the focus of the celebrity-oriented talk about it, BeastWeek's DOA.

Sorry, it is.

It's not about them, it's about the product and the tech, and the approach. It's also why most of the hottest media platforms are not ran by journalists: TMZ.com, TechCrunch, and PerezHilton.com, to name some of the examples.

BeastWeek. Give it two or three years tops.

Unless...