Andrew Golis

That’s all I kept thinking as I read this faux interview with The Daily Beast’s editor Tina Brown.

Like TPM, they’re building one of the hybrid operations I’ve described before as the future that mixes original content and aggregation.  Or, as Brown describes it:

Does the world really need another news aggregator?

The Daily Beast doesn’t aggregate. It sifts, sorts, and curates. We’re as much about what’s not there as what is. And we freshen the stream with a good helping of our own original content from a wonderfully diverse group of contributors … satirist Christopher Buckley, historian Sean Wilentz, former McCain adviser Mark McKinnon, Project Runway’s Laura Bennett, the former editor of Al-Hayat Salameh Nematt, Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg, Nick Ciarelli who founded Think Secret, and many others.

And, while TPM focuses on electoral politics and investigative journalism, they’re producing and aggregating for an audience interested in high brow culture and a kind of non-ideological political elitism (what else connects liberal Princeton Professor Sean Wilentz and Libertarian satirist Christopher Buckley?):

Why should I visit you when there’s already Slate/Drudge/Huffington Post/TPM/Google News and every other magazine and newspaper?

Sensibility, darling.

Anyway, you don’t have to use it instead. Just use it first. I shall certainly continue with my own forays around the web. But we all have only one pair of eyes and ears. We’re hoping that if you like the sensibility The Daily Beast brings to choosing news and opinion then you’ll trust us to be the lens you view it through.

I have to say, when I first read about this project, I was extremely skeptical.  My skepticism was mostly driven by the assumption that this was an old media legend trying to do what all the kids are doing but not really getting it.  But from this interview, that’s clearly not true. I’m still not 100% sure there’s really an audience that is looking for that sensibility, but god knows Tina Brown would know better than I would.

If she’s right that there’s a market for her sensibility, my guess is The Daily Beast will be extremely successful.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 4:06 pm and is filed under media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.