There’s finally a bit of good news for American journalism: the venerable newsmagazine Newsweek, which recently changed ownership, and the solid Internet reporting/analysis site The Daily Beast are going to merge — a case of the new media and old media giving each other what they need to (potentially) thrive and grow.
The report comes after weeks of speculation that the two companies would merge, and reports that the deal was falling through. But now The New York Observer reports that an announcement will be made shortly:
Newsweek and The Daily Beast will announce tomorrow morning that the two publications will merge, a source close to the deal tells The Observer.
It will be a 50-50 merger of the two companies. The editorial staffs will combine under the editorship of Tina Brown, who will again run a high-profile glossy.
Newsweek owner Sidney Harman, 92, and IAC chairman Barry Diller had for weeks disagreed over an operating structure for the hybrid publication. The deal reached today establishes a daily role for Mr. Harman and strong editorial independence for Ms. Brown.
As The Observer reported earlier today, talks between Mr. Harman and Mr. Diller never completely broke down, as the media world thought for weeks. The two men continued to meet and inched toward a deal. Tonight, they are hammering out a couple of sticking points, and will announce the new business tomorrow.
What will the new entity be called? 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.
How about Newsbeast? Or The Daily Week. Or something that’ll attract younger readers: The Justin Bebier Beast Weekly.
All (lame) levity aside. This is good news for American journalism at a time when the new media is assuming an increasing role. Both The National Journal and Huffington Post have been gobbling up respected mainstream media reporters. Now there’s an actual merger — which should help strengthen and legitimize both organizations at a time when fact-based journalism is becoming less popular than opinion-based journalism. The old concept of a mainstream media trying to garner a broad audience is being displaced by publications and websites scrambling to capture more narrow ideological niches. Yet, Time is still out there — and it’ll continue to have an energetic rival under this new plan.
HERE’S SOME OTHER WEB REACTION TO THIS STORY:
—Mediaite:
Back in August, the struggling weekly Newsweek was purchased by Sidney Harmon for the amount of $1, plus terms that the audio mogul would take on millions of dollars of debt. Some derided that decision as a vanity play, but if this report is true, he comes out looking like the 50% owner of a white hot property that has both a print ad revenue model and editorial expertise from Ms. Brown. There are sure to be lots of questions to be asked on what the future partnered entity will look like, and alas, this will likely result in lots of redundant positions (job losses) but the good news is that, at least Newsweek will live.
Trivia question: what do The Daily Beast and Newsweek have in common? Both have design elements from the creative force of Bonnie Seigler, who both oversaw the original design elements of The Daily Beast as well as the redesign of Newsweek. Perhaps she was on to something?
If this deal really is happening—who wouldn’t be surprised to see it had been called off again—this could be help the two outlets reach their respective goals. The Daily Beast has been considering the creation of a print version. And Newsweek needs a strong shot in the arm if it’s going to return to relevancy. For The Daily Beast, it is probably less work and less costly to remake an existing magazine with remaining brand equity with readers and advertisers than to create a whole new publication from scratch.
Still, it’s unclear what a “50/50” merger means. Will it become “The Daily Beast’s Newsweek?” Either way, whatever the name is, it will bear Brown’s distinctive stamp at a time when print advertising appears to be slowly coming back from historic lows. But that doesn’t mean that this merger has great chances of success either. But it does improve the situation, at least for Newsweek.
Both are also confronting challenges of their own. Newsweek, like all news weeklies to one degree or another, was suffering growing competition from digital media. Changes to the media business proved stark enough that U.S. News & World Report, once a solid No. 3 in the competition with Time and Newsweek, essentially went all digital last week. But The Daily Beast faces the same reality that many content sites have encountered: Good content can attract audiences, but those audiences don’t necessarily translate into a big, sustainable business.
The talks seemed to break down in mid-October, however, largely over issues of control. “The engagement was fun but the pre-nup got too complex,” Ms. Brown told her staff in a memo.
The “complexities” of Newsweek’s “infrastructure, legacy and our desire to stay nimble ultimately made this not the right decision at this time,” she said in an email to The New York Times.
But those issues now seem to be nearly resolved. On Thursday evening, The Observer reported that a merger agreement will be announced Friday morning after Mr. Harman and Mr. Diller finish “hammering out a couple of sticking points.”
The person familiar with the talks confirmed the sentiment but rated an announcement Friday morning “possible,” not a certainty.
Talks got hot and heavy in October, but broke down over details.The deal will be an even 50-50 merger, with the staffs combining, and Tina Brown running the whole show.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.