Newsweek and The Daily Beast are now The Newsweek/Daily Beast Co. LLC, as the merger between the two entities, originally announced Nov. 12, is now official.
The Daily Beast founding partner and editor-in-chief Tina Brown will serve as editor-in-chief of the combined properties, and Daily Beast president Stephen Colvin will be its CEO. Newsweek owner Sidney Harman will be executive chairman of its board, and IAC chairman Barry Diller will be a director.
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The Center for Public Integrity will provide exclusive content to soon-to-be-siblings Newsweek and The Daily Beast under terms of an agreement announced Monday.
The pact kicks off with a story in the Feb. 7 issue of Newsweek about the shortfalls of digital mammography, and Newsweek and The Daily Beast will pay the Center for Public Integrity for exclusive stories going forward, marking the latter’s first pay-for-content deal in more than 20 years.
The ongoing merger between Newsweek and The Daily Beast moved one step closer to completion with the announcement by The Newspaper Guild of New York that it reached a framework agreement with Newsweek parent Harman Newsweek LLC.
Under terms of the pact, “a wide range” of editorial employees from The Daily Beast will be included under the existing collective bargaining agreement between the guild and Newsweek.
Daily Beast employees with pay below the minimums set by the existing CBA will be brought up to scale, and their seniority will be dovetailed with that of guild-represented Newsweek employees. And voluntary buyouts will be offered to certain classes of current Newsweek employees. From the announcement:
Under the framework agreement between the guild and Harman Newsweek LLC, non-supervisory editorial employees who produce The Daily Beast will be covered by the same contract that now covers many of Newsweek‘s reporters, editors, and other news employees, upon completion of the merger. The agreement was a necessary prelude to the completion of the merger of the two news organizations that was announced Dec. 6.
Reports of the demise of Newsweek.com appear to have been premature, as Tina Brown, newly named editor-in-chief of the combined The Newsweek Daily Beast Co., sent a Tweet denying that Newsweek.com would disappear in favor of The Daily Beast.
Brown Tweeted, “Woah! Newsweek.com‘s superb content will live on under its own banner & in URLs on the new site. Not shutting down, combining.”
Newly named CEO Stephen Colvin was quoted in Mediaweek as saying that The Daily Beast was the survivor “because The Daily Beast is a very credible and successful news and opinion Web site, and with great vitality and distinct voice.”
A blistering Tumblr site, Save Newsweek.com, written by an unnamed Newsweek.com staffer, appeared Sunday, with a passionate defense of the Web site and critical comments about Newsweek management. The post read:
It’s always nice to wake up and find out in the Times that your job is doomed. As they put it on Saturday morning, quoting the new CEO of the so-called Newsweek Daily Beast Co., Stephen Colvin: “Newsweek.com will cease to exist after the merger, and anyone who types the URL into their browser will be redirected to TheDailyBeast.com.”
This, of course, was news to Newsweek.com. So rather than going out and celebrating our merger after six months of uncertainty — and hopefully some stability after a year that saw four Newsweek.com editors-in-chief come and go — we’re spending our weekend bombarded by a flurry of emails, wondering how this could have happened. And writing this.
Once thought to be on life support, the agreement to merge Newsweek and The Daily Beast roared to recovery and became a reality Friday morning, as the magazine and Web site announced that they will merge their operations into a joint venture owned equally by Sidney Harman, who recently gained control of Newsweek, and Barry Diller-helmed IAC.
Harman will be executive chairman of The Newsweek Daily Beast Co., and Diller will be one director, with one apiece to be named from each side. The Daily Beast founding partner and editor-in-chief Tina Brown will be editor-in-chief of both entities, and the CEO of the joint venture will be The Daily Beast president Stephen Colvin.
Brown described the revival of the merger in a post on The Daily Beast:
Some weddings take longer to plan than others. The union of The Daily Beast and Newsweek magazine finally took place with a coffee-mug toast between all parties Tuesday evening, in a conference room atop Beast headquarters, the IAC building on Manhattan’s West 18th Street. The final details were only hammered out last night.
What does this exciting new media marriage mean? It means that The Daily Beast’s animal high spirits will now be teamed with a legendary, weekly print magazine in a joint venture, named The Newsweek Daily Beast Co., owned equally by Barry Diller’s IAC and Sidney Harman, owner (and savior) of Newsweek. As for me, I shall now be in the editor-in-chief’s chair at both The Daily Beast and Newsweek, bringing with us as CEO my Daily Beast business partner, Stephen Colvin, who launched The Week Magazine in the United States, as well as Maxim, as president of Dennis Publishing. His dynamism has created 66 new ad campaigns for us since I persuaded him to join The Daily Beast a year ago.
Whether or not Newsweek has anything to do with it, The Daily Beast announced its second high-profile hire in as many days, following Monday’s news of the addition of David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, with Tuesday’s naming of The Washington Post media reporter and CNN Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz as Washington bureau chief.
Kurtz, who will continue to host Reliable Sources, said, “I’ve wanted to work with [The Daily Beast founder] Tina Brown forever — well, for a long time — and I’m incredibly impressed by the energy and creativity of The Daily Beast staff. After a lifetime in newspapers, I’m ready for the challenge of fast-paced online journalism.”
Tina Brown, the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and the short-lived Talk, launched a trial version of a Web and iPhone-only site called The Daily Beast, funded by Barry Diller‘s IAC new media empire on Monday, according to the Financial Times.
The report said that the site is pitched as both a home to original commentary and a “curator” of other sites’ highlights, putting it in competition with an ever-growing list of bloggers and news aggregators.
The iPhone site in particular is interesting to us, because it shows that as more publications move from print to the Web, it makes it easier to develop a mobile strategy in tandem with a digital edition. This is the first time we remember seeing a major magazine launch with an iPhone-specific site ready to go on day one.
