The Beast is loose
Tina Brown's new project -- I almost typed "Tina Fey's," which hints at how one Tina has eclipsed the other in the cultural firmament in the last few years, especially the last few weeks -- launched today, if you hadn't noticed. It's called The Daily Beast.
The site's pointers to other articles and sources of information are sharply written, and the whole thing is crisply designed. But does the world need another site aggregating and riffing on cultural and political content found on the Web? (I probably shouldn't ask that.)
For the record, Brown, in a Q & A on the site, quibbles with the idea that the Beast is an aggregator. "The Daily Beast doesn't aggregate. It sifts, sorts, and curates." Gotcha. And, to be fair, there are some well-known writers who have been recruited to feed the Beast: Christopher Buckley, Tucker Carlson, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali will be blogging, for example.
As of this writing, the front page -- am I the only one having a hard time loading it? -- screams "Bastard Americans," linking to a short, original-to-the-Beast post by Andrew Neil, about European perspectives on the credit train wreck. But the best piece I found through the site was an essay in the Guardian, by William Skidelsky, wondering aloud why the latest gilded age (now coming to an end?) has not produced great art.
It seems like a dicey time to be starting up a Web publication, but I'm more inclined to give Brown the benefit of the doubt than some others (especially since I'm reading her excellent Diana biography, which is marred only by a few playing-to-the-bleachers moments of mawkishness. But fewer than you'd expect).
One thought on the title: After the Slate column "Chatterbox" and now "The Daily Beast," whose names are plucked out of comic novels by Evelyn Waugh (the Beast is the newspaper of the hapless foreign-correspondent-by-mistake protagonist in "Scoop," Brown's favorite novel), it's probably time to stop going to that particular well.
And an inside-baseball observation: Doesn't "Buzz Board," a Beast feature that asks notable politicians, writers, and others, for cultural recommendations directly compete with Very Short List, the daily email that recommends a book, movie or other cultural artifact daily? Both are financed by IAC, Barry Diller's company -- and Very Short List was dreamed up with the help of Kurt Andersen, like Brown an early-'90s magazine superstar and, at least in the past, a Brown antagonist.
