Team ‘Beast’: Barry Diller and Tina Brown.Photo: WireImage
Tina Brown has finally revealed something about her upcoming media Website, which she’ll be launching this fall with the backing of her old pal Barry Diller. It will be called the Daily Beast, in homage to the newspaper in the British scribe Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Gawker worries that the Internet generation won’t get the reference, but we’d argue that many young kids trying to make their way in the media industry read Scoop as a matter of general preparation. Much in the way aspiring architects feel obligated to skim The Fountainhead or bankers keep Liars Poker on their bookshelves, next to Den of Thieves.
But does the name tell us anything about Brown’s hush-hush site? Not really. Sure, it will be run by a tyrannical press baron (in the book, Lord Copper; in real life, Barry Diller), but the similarities will likely end there. One of the central jokes of Scoop is that the Beast will create its own news if there is nothing else to report. From what we’ve heard about Brown’s site, it will be largely an aggregator, along the lines of the Huffington Post. So it, in fact, will be doing the opposite — only repeating outside news, while generating little or none of its own. Perhaps this is Brown’s larger commentary on the state of where media is going.
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Related: Barry Diller and Tina Brown Team Up to Start News-Aggregator Site
