The Newsweek Daily Beast Company

The Newsweek Daily Beast Company

Type	Joint venture
Industry	Newspapers
Genre	media
Founded	November 2010
Key people	Stephen Colvin, CEO Sidney Harman, Executive Chairman
Products	Newsweek, The Daily Beast
Owner(s)	IAC (50%)[1] Sidney Harman (50%)[1]
Website	http://www.newsweek.com/

The Newsweek Daily Beast Company is an American media company, and owner of Newsweek and The Daily Beast. It was established in 2010 as a merger between the two media outlets. The company is owned by IAC and Sidney Harman, with Stephen Colvin of The Daily Beast as CEO.^[2]

History

Newsweek magazine was launched in 1933 by a group of U.S. stockholders "which included Ward Cheney, of the Cheney silk family, John Hay Whitney, and Paul Mellon, son of Andrew W. Mellon," according to America's 60 Families by Ferdinand Lundberg. The Daily Beast was founded in 2008 by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker as well as the short-lived Talk Magazine.

Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company in 1961.^[3] With increasing competition from online news sources, years of financial losses forced the Company to sell the magazine in 2010 to Harman Media, owned by Sidney Harman. ^[4]

Merger

In November 2010, it was announced that Newsweek and The Daily Beast will merge into a joint venture named The Newsweek Daily Beast Company, with IAC and Sidney Harman each owning 50% of the new company. Harman's rationale for the merger was that: "In an admittedly challenging time, this merger provides the ideal combination of established journalism authority and bright, bristling website savvy." ^[1] The company plans to redirect the Newsweek.com address to The Daily Beast, despite the fact that the former has higher traffic.^[2]

Tina Brown, who co-founded The Daily Beast, will act as editor-in-chief for both Newsweek and The Daily Beast.^[1]

Reception to the merger has not been positive. As former Newsweek president Mark Edmiston comments on the New York Times, "I don’t see how you can take two money-losing businesses and put them together and come up with a single entity that makes money."^[2] As the two businesses target very different demographics, Edmiston questioned the appeal of the merger to advertisers.

Newsweek staffers have reacted ambivalently to the merger. There is opposition against redirecting the Newsweek.com site, due to the amount of effort and work that staffers have spent on building the site. The news came unexpectedly to staffers, a sentiment reflected on SaveNewsweek.com, which states that "It’s always nice to wake up and find out in the Times that your job is doomed".^[2]

Company holdings

The Company owns Newsweek, a news magazine, and The Daily Beast, a news website.

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d} "50/50 Joint Venture will Merge all Newsweek Businesses and The Daily Beast’s Digital Assets; Tina Brown to Serve as Editor-in-Chief". The Daily Beast. November 12, 2010. http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-12/newsweek-daily-beast-merge-announcement/. Retrieved November 19, 2010. 
2. ^ ^{a b c d} Carr, David (November 14, 2010). "Newsweek Weds Daily Beast? Good Luck With That". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/business/media/15carr.html. Retrieved November 19, 2010. 
3. ^ Salisbury, Harrison E. (March 10, 1961). "Washington Post Buys Newsweek. It Acquires 59% of Stock From Astor Foundation for $8,000,000.". The New York Times. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0A1FF93F5D1B728DDDA90994DB405B818AF1D3. Retrieved 2008-04-14. "The Washington Post Company bought control of Newsweek magazine yesterday from the Vincent Astor Foundation. The sale ended several weeks of intensive negotiation involving a number of publishing companies." 
4. ^ Ahrens, Frank (August 3, 2010). "Harman Media buys Newsweek from Washington Post Co. for undisclosed amount". Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/02/AR2010080203970.html. Retrieved November 19, 2010. 

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