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NewsBeast
Company typeJoint venture
IndustryNewspapers
Genremedia
FoundedNovember 2010
DefunctNovember 2013
Key people
Baba Shetty, CEO[1]
ProductsNewsweek, The Daily Beast (until 2013)

NewsBeast was 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 was owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp and the estate of Sidney Harman, with Stephen Colvin of The Daily Beast as CEO. In August 2013, IBT Media acquired Newsweek, leaving The Daily Beast under the management of The Newsweek Daily Beast Company, which today operates as a subsidiary of IAC.[2]

History

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See also: Newsweek § History, and The Daily Beast

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

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In November 2010, it was announced that Newsweek and The Daily Beast would merge into a joint venture named The Newsweek Daily Beast Company, with IAC and Sidney Harman each owning 50 percent 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."[5] The company plans to redirect the Newsweek.com address to The Daily Beast, despite the fact that the former has higher traffic.

Tina Brown, who co-founded The Daily Beast, acts as editor-in-chief for both Newsweek and The Daily Beast.[5]

Reception to the merger was not 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."[6] As the two businesses target very different demographics, Edmiston questioned the appeal of the merger to advertisers.

Newsweek staffers reacted ambivalently to the merger. There was opposition to 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".[7]

In 2012, it was announced that Newsweek would stop publishing its print magazine by December. The Newsweek brand would be retooled as Newsweek Global and continue as a digital-only magazine for e-book readers and tablet computers.[8]

On February 1, 2013, Brian Ries, the social media editor for NewsBeast, announced that the company had changed its name.[9]

On August 3, 2013, IBT Media announced it had acquired Newsweek from IAC on terms that were not disclosed; the acquisition included the Newsweek brand and its online publication, but did not include The Daily Beast.[10]

Company holdings

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The company owned Newsweek, a news magazine, and The Daily Beast, a news website.

References

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  1. ^ Hagey, Keach (October 18, 2012). "Newsweek Quits Print". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved April 1, 2018.
  2. ^ "The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC: Private Company Information". Bloomberg. March 5, 2014. Retrieved April 1, 2018.
  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. 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". The Washington Post. Retrieved November 19, 2010.
  5. ^ a b "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. Retrieved November 19, 2010.
  6. ^ Carr, David (November 14, 2010). "Newsweek Weds Daily Beast? Good Luck With That". The New York Times. Retrieved November 19, 2010.
  7. ^ Tiku, Nitasha (November 15, 2010). "Passive-Aggressive Notes From the Online Staff at Newsweek". New York. Retrieved November 19, 2010.
  8. ^ Saba, Jennifer (18 October 2012). "After 79 years in print, Newsweek goes digital only". Reuters. Retrieved 23 October 2012.
  9. ^ "Newsweek Daily Beast Is NewsBeast, and That's the End of That Chapter". The Atlantic. February 1, 2013. Retrieved 2021-01-18.
  10. ^ "IBT Media to Acquire Newsweek" (Press release). International Business Times. August 3, 2013. Archived from the original on October 14, 2014. Retrieved 2013-08-04.
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