The beast is unleashed: looking at Tina Brown’s new site

As reported all over the shop, yesterday saw the launch of the online news aggregator site, The Daily Beast, captained by former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair and The NewYorker, Tina Brown, and backed by Barry Diller, of IAC/InterActiveCorp.

PaidContent had managed a sneak preview, but the likes of Roy Greenslade, and Journalism.co.uk had to wait till its official grand unveiling yesterday afternoon.

Named after the fictional tabloid in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel, Scoop, Tina Brown describes The Daily Beast, on her site, as: “the omnivorous friend who hears about the best stuff and forwards it to you with a twist.”

Her motley crew boasts the satirist Chris Buckley, former McCain adviser Mark McKinnon, Project Runway’s Laura Bennett and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg.

The site’s bold red and black design has a large list of contributors and features a collection of news, opinion, blogs, links and video.

Over at Cyber Journalist Net they reckon it’s ‘about 30 percent original content’ and Gawker is having fun speculating about Brown’s spending habits.

Opinion in the US seems to be split on the site: Deadline Hollywood’s Nikki Finke thinks it ’sucks’, but as the New York Observer points out she said that about Huffington as well.

Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune reckons there’s irony in the choice of title but doesn’t think that necessarily matters.

With absolutely no advertising on the site, it will be interesting to see whether The Daily Beast can survive in the online jungle. It seems to have had a lion’s share of initial hype at least.

Tags: aggregation, Barry Diller, Chicago Tribune, Chris Buckley, daily beast, Evelyn Waugh, IAC/InterActiveCorp, Laura Bennett, Mark McKinnon, Nikki Finke, online news aggregator site, Steve Johnson, Tatler, the New York Observer, Tina Brown, USA

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Associated Press: Tribune’s out-of-date UAL story was revived by clicks on website

The outdated bankruptcy story that caused panic for United Airlines share-holders came back to life because it showed up on a newspaper web site's 'most viewed' section. Full story...

Tags: Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, newspaper web site, United Airlines

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Chicago Tribune: Sports news a ‘website business’, says Sun-Times columnist

Sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times Jay Mariotti has quit the paper after 17 years, claiming sports journalism has an online-only future. Full story...

Tags: Chicago Tribune, Jay Mariotti, sport, sports journalism, USA

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Huffington Post: Social media team drives up traffic at Chicago Tribune

The Chicago Tribune's move into the social media world of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter has result in an 8 per cent rise in page views. Full story...

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EveryBlock teams up with the Chicago Tribune

EveryBlock, the local news and data aggregation service, has gone into a beta partnership with the Chicago Tribune.

The paper will publish a map and local news articles powered by EveryBlock, an announcement on the site’s blog says. Articles from the last 48 hours will be plotted on the Trib map to allow users to search geographically.

“[I]t’s an experiment in a new form of news dissemination - that is, news filtered at the block level - and journalists can look to us for inspiration in new forms of publishing information. Second, we unearth a lot of government data that journalists might be interested in researching further,” EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty said in an interview with Journalism.co.uk.

Tags: Adrian Holovaty, Chicago Tribune, Local, Mapping

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Spot the difference: AFP withdraws ‘digitally altered’ missile shot

Agence France-Presse (AFP) has retracted a photo of Iranian missile tests published this morning, stating the image had been ‘apparently digitally altered’ by Iran’s state media, the New York Times’ Lede section reports.

It was too late for the print editions of the LA Times, Financial Times, Chicago Tribune and others, who ran the pic on the front page, and for the BBC, New York Times and Yahoo News websites.

Below - spot the difference between 1) the AFP’s image…

…and 2) an image later obtained by the Associated Press:

According to the Lede’s report, the agency said the fourth missile may have been added to mask a grounded missile that failed to launch during the test.

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Eighty newsroom jobs to go at Chicago Tribune

The Chicago Tribune is to follow the LA Times by culling newsroom jobs and reducing the number of pages in its printed editions.

Around 80 of its 578 newsroom posts are expected to be culled with further cuts appearing in non-journalistic positions.

The printed edition of the Tribune is expected to reduce the number of pages it publishes by 13 or 14 per cent each week.

Management began informing staff of the changes late on Tuesady, the Tribune itself reported.

This is the fourth round of staff cuts since 2005, when the paper had nearly 700 newsroom staff on its books. In real terms the paper expects to lose around 55 people as positions made vacant in recent months have remained unfilled.

Last week, The Los Angeles Times, another Tribune Company newspaper, announced that it would reduce the number of pages it published each week by 15 per cent anddo away with 250 staff roles, 150 of them from the newsroom.

Tags: Chicago, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Tribune company, USA

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