Newsweek, Daily Beast joining
Deal brings Tina Brown to run decades-old magazine
NEW YORK – Newsweek, a 77-year-old magazine that once helped set the national news agenda, is linking its future with a start-up website just two years in the making.
Three months after agreeing to buy the money-losing weekly for $1, audio equipment magnate Sidney Harman has completed on-again, off-again negotiations to merge it with the Daily Beast.
It is not just a marriage between old and new media. Harman will also be getting magazine veteran Tina Brown as editor-in-chief of Newsweek. Brown, who was a co-founder of the Daily Beast, had led both Vanity Fair and the New Yorker before deciding to give Web publishing a try.
Brown said in a post Thursday on the Daily Beast that the deal was settled Tuesday “with a coffee-mug toast between all parties.”
It will create a joint venture called the Newsweek Daily Beast Co. Harman and Barry Diller, who backs the Daily Beast through his media conglomerate, IAC/InterActive Corp, will serve as directors on the venture’s board.
Neither side disclosed how they will split revenue that the company generates.
Although Newsweek has faced a steady decline in both readership and advertising revenue, print magazines still generally take in far more money than their Web-only counterparts.
The Daily Beast also has a smaller online audience than Newsweek.com – about 2.9 million unique visitors in October compared with Newsweek’s 5.4 million, according to the research firm comScore.
Even so, the latest tie-up is just one of several instances in which Web and print publications have decided they can do better teaming up than remaining apart.
Another struggling but still prominent magazine, Forbes, bought a Web operation called True/Slant over the summer. Like the Daily Beast, the site was also run by a print veteran, Lewis Dvorkin, who is now remaking Forbes as a more Web-centric company.