Newsweek will merge in a 50-50 joint venture with the Daily Beast, the publications said Friday, a transaction designed to combine the magazine’s resources and depth with the Web site’s more sophisticated understanding of Internet culture.Editor of the combined magazine will be Tina Brown, who had a well earned reputation for being brash, irreverent and in-your-face as editor of The New Yorker. Newsweek has a reputation for being, uh, stale and antiquated might be the kindest words for it. Dull. Boring. Sinking ship. Other words come to mind.
All of which prompted this from Juli Weiner of Vanity Fair (in part quoting another media critic Rick Summers, one of droves of journalists who recently left Newsweek):
Perhaps the most tantalizing detail of the Observer story is the hint of rebranding. “For now, Newsweek will be called Newsweek and The Daily Beast will be called The Daily Beast, with some intermingling of the names to come later,” Summers wrote. The media’s tweeting masses interpreted this as something of a challenge. Beast Week, the Daily Week, Week Beast, and News Beast were all suggested as potential appellation for the new venture, although the “Daily News” was not a contender, for that has already been claimed by the Daily News. ...Lame jokes, but the issue is real. The merger raises legitimate issues of branding. Which image will the new combined magazine project? Newsweek and The Daily Beast couldn't be much farther apart. What's the new magazine's mission? What are its core values going to be? All these strategic planning buzzwords try to get at things that are real, even if they're hard to define. How do you put in-your-face and interesting in a mission statement? On a T-shirt? Here's what Tina Brown said this morning in The Daily Beast:
It’s a wonderful new opportunity for all the brilliant editors and writers at The Daily Beast who have worked so hard to create the site’s success. Working at the warp-speed of a 24/7 news operation, we now add the versatility of being able to develop ideas and investigations that require a different narrative pace suited to the medium of print. And for Newsweek, The Daily Beast is a thriving frontline of breaking news and commentary that will raise the profile of the magazine’s bylines and quicken the pace of a great magazine’s revival. I'm impressed with how Newsweek's outstanding staff has continued to put out a lively, well-informed magazine after the departure of their tireless editor, Jon Meacham.It's also a wonderful new riverboat gamble. But it may be exactly what's needed to keep Newsweek from going under.
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