Renowned editor Tina Brown is ending her time with the Internet beast.
Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp will not renew Brown’s contract as the editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast when it expires in January. Brown confirmed the news to her staff on Wednesday.
“Creating The Daily Beast at the original instigation of Barry Diller in 2008 has given me some of the most exciting and fulfilling years of my professional life,” Brown said in her statement, “I am enormously proud of what our brilliant editorial team has achieved at the Beast. And I am proud, too, of what we did with Newsweek in the battle we waged to save it from the overwhelming forces of media change.”
A source familiar with the situation told the Daily News that Brown’s exit had been in the works for some time and will be devoting her time to the Women In the World Foundation.
“Tina’s split has been in negotiations with Barry Diller for over a year, is totally amicable,” the source said.
The famed former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker was unable to make the The Daily Beast profitable in her five years at the helm of the website, despite increases in ad sales and user traffic.
Moreover, her tenure at the Beast was marked by a number of high profile miscues, such as her short-lived stewardship of Newsweek magazine, which published its final issue in December of 2012, just two years after being put under Brown’s direction. This summer, the title was sold off to IBT Media.
While Brown scored a coup by luring Andrew Sullivan to publish his popular blog at the Beast in 2011, his departure at the start of this year came as a blow.
More bad news for the Beast followed this spring, when Brown fired the website’s Washington bureau chief, Howard Kurtz, after he published an error-filled column on NBA center Jason Collins.
Kurtz then went on to publish an article about what he saw as the leadership “dysfunction” at The Beast, to which Brown did not respond kindly.
“Hey @HowardKurtz am I forgetting something or didn’t I fire you for serial inaccuracy?” Brown quipped on Twitter. “Shurely shome mishtake as British hacks like to say.”
Of course, Brown is no stranger to high-profile stumbles. Talk magazine, which Brown founded in 1999, closed shop less than three years later due to weak sales and subscription figures.
Ever the master of self-reinvention, Brown is said to be preparing to launch her own company, Tina Brown Live Media.
“(Tina Brown Live Media) is really a marriage of her commitment to journalism and storytelling, it’s going to be really event orientated,” a source familiar with Brown’s plans told Politico.
No decision has yet been announced as to who might succeed Brown as the Daily Beast’s next editor.
