When Tina Brown turned her back on magazines a year ago to launch a website called The Daily Beast, some scoffed in the media world she once reigned as editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.
What, the critics asked, did a woman whose career had spanned lavish glossies from Tatler to Talk, know about the demands of online journalism? And what space was there for what sounded like yet another aggregator-blog hybrid, even if it was to be leavened by contributions from Ms Brown’s famous contact book?
For some, even its name, taken from Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s satire of Fleet Street, seemed a sign that Ms Brown and Barry Diller, whose IAC internet empire funded the launch, just didn’t get the internet.
One year on, as she scans her BlackBerry in London’s Sanderson Hotel, Ms Brown can point to a top 10 position on Technorati’s ranking of influential blogs, ahead of celebrity gossip site TMZ.com and Andrew Sullivan’s well-established politics blog, The Daily Dish.
In September, the site attracted 3.9m unique users, its highest monthly audience. Ms Brown says it has become “the smart person’s news site”.
Adapting to the “breakneck speed” of online commentary took a while, Ms Brown admits. Now, however, she is racing to bolster her roster of contributors with a staff of full-time writers and sub-sites such as Sexy Beast, Art Beast, Book Beast and Hungry Beast, even before the core site has broken even.
She is also getting back into printed media. Given her record, it is startling when she announces that she sees no future for long-form magazine pieces “of the old kind”, outside the pages of The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair, and proclaims that “books are the new magazines”.
However, Daily Beast writers are to be encouraged to “exercise their narrative journalism muscles” through a tie-up with Perseus Books to produce books of no more than 50,000 words.
“People’s time spans are so short, they either want a short ‘nerve centre’ piece immediately, or they want a short book they can read on a plane,” she says. “A lot of stuff about the [financial] meltdown I would have liked to be marinated over three or four months, but I didn’t want to wait a year and a half.”
The model, which will be tested in January with a book by John Avlon called Attack of the Wingnuts, will be to launch e-books for Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s Reader, and then to print paperbacks for titles that have sold well.
Such initiatives are being rolled out at a stage when no one is prepared to disclose The Daily Beast’s revenues, and when advertising is sparse in a harsh commercial climate.
Caroline Marks, The Daily Beast’s general manager, says this is by design. “Barry Diller has been very clear about building quality content businesses and giving them room to build their audiences before foisting break-even on them,” she says in an interview in IAC’s New York headquarters.
The Daily Beast was, from the start, in part an experiment to find a better class of online advertising in a market where infinite supply has dragged down rates.
In an effort to charge premium prices, the site has targeted upmarket brands with the promise of customised packages that could reach a sought-after audience of affluent, educated and engaged readers.
Its efforts have seen a sponsored interview with Bottega Veneta’s “revered creative director” take over a spot in the rotating box of top stories on the home page, and a British Airways-branded “arrivals board”, highlighting recently posted stories alongside offers on flights to London. Such initiatives have shown a willingness to give advertisers prime editorial slots at a time when many US newspapers agonise about carrying advertising on their front pages.
“All our programmes have been custom-built, and everything has been at a premium to the standard rate,” Ms Marks says, although she says, in time, these experiments will crystallise into “standard custom” formats.
Mr Diller remains “a big believer” in online advertising, she adds, although he also thinks that subscription models being tested by many large publishers will establish themselves over the next five years.
Mr Diller admits that it is not yet clear whether The Daily Beast has found a better model. “It’s not yet in evidence, but I’m hopeful,” he says in a telephone interview. “At some point, advertising is going to evolve from banners and 200 x 300 boxes that aren’t particularly compelling.”
Mr Diller hopes that is going to happen “before we run out of money” but insists he has not put “a judgment-day date” on when IAC will decide whether or not The Daily Beast can pay its way. “We’ll all know it when we know it,” he says.
A year after a launch that was brought forward to catch the final weeks of the US election, but which caught the post-Lehman Brothers collapse in advertising markets, Mr Diller says he is undeterred by the conditions that have wrought havoc even on established media owners such as Condé Nast and The New York Times.
“I like leading into a bad economy,” he explains. “I think it’s a pretty good discipline if you’re in a lousy environment. Nobody expects much of you, so you can work under dark, and that edge of ‘my God, what are we doing’ I think is positive.”
For Ms Brown, the problems of traditional media are as much to do with “self-inflicted damage” stemming from “corporate greed” as with competition from the internet.
Speaking hours before a book launch for her husband, Harry Evans, that was filled by grand old names from journalism’s print heyday, she warns: “These big companies are cutting editorial costs to get greater returns. The product becomes an empty shell and readers drift away.”
The Daily Beast remains a largely US phenomenon and still trails The Huffington Post, Drudge Report and Politico.com in traffic figures, although Ms Marks hopes to be of similar size to Huffington’s site by the 2012 US election.
For now, Mr Diller expresses satisfaction: “It’s so much more than I thought it would be at this early stage in terms of audience, and in terms of establishing itself as this thing, this Beast.”
