Stop the presses! Ms. Tina Brown adds yet another magnificent beast to her media menagerie

With all the media studs Ms. Tina is assembling for The Daily Beast and the forthcoming revamped Newsweek, we must surely be witnessing a media juggernaut in the making, no?

"The chance to be part of a whole new experiment in online and print journalism, in the Daily Beast and Newsweek adventure, is just too fascinating and exciting a challenge to pass up. And to work with media legends, Barry Diller and Tina Brown, and with the extraordinary businessmen Sidney Harman and Stephen Colvin, is the opportunity of a lifetime."

-- Andrew Sullivan, as quoted in a NYT "Media Decoder" piece

by Ken

Well, my goodness, Andrew, what is there to say except that every now and then, gosh darn it, dreams do come true?

I assume you've been keeping track of the succession of hires Ms. Tina Brown has been making for her new media entity, which will combine her current Daily Beast webzine with a revamped Newsweek to be under her editorial control as well. I'm not going to regale you with the list of media luminaries. Let Ms. Tina hire her own PR flacks.

But golly gee, Andrew Sullivan! Hard on the heels of the acquisition of (gasp) the Washington Post's "Howie the Hump" Kurtz, as you'll note in the following piece from the NYT's "Media Decoder" today. (Consult the on-site version for links.)

February 27, 2011, 10:31 PM

Andrew Sullivan Joins Daily Beast and Newsweek
By M. AMEDEO TUMOLILLO

The start date of Tina Brown's reinvented Newsweek after its merger with her Daily Beast Web site remains vague, but Ms. Brown's efforts to build an impressive roster do not: Andrew Sullivan announced Sunday that his popular blog, "The Daily Dish," would leave TheAtlantic.com and join Ms. Brown's team in April.

"The chance to be part of a whole new experiment in online and print journalism, in the Daily Beast and Newsweek adventure, is just too fascinating and exciting a challenge to pass up," Mr. Sullivan said in a blog entry. "And to work with media legends, Barry Diller and Tina Brown, and with the extraordinary businessmen Sidney Harman and Stephen Colvin, is the opportunity of a lifetime."

Mr. Sullivan will join Howard Kurtz, a three-decade veteran of The Washington Post who was lured to The Daily Beast in October 2010. At the time, Mr. Kurtz's move ignited speculation that The Daily Beast would merge with Newsweek, which it did one month later. Mr. Kurtz said then that he wanted to "be more of an entrepreneur online."

Commenting on Mr. Sullivan's move, Ms. Brown said in a blog post that the blogger's "fearlessness and doggedness makes him a natural soul mate of The Daily Beast."

"A rarity, he is willing to admit mistakes and change positions (sometimes radically) in the face of new evidence," she said. "Little wonder he has built one of the most devoted followings on the web, with 1.2 million unique visitors a month, 82 percent of them bookmarked."

Ms. Brown said that The Daily Beast garnered more than six million unique visitors last month. In late 2010, Mr. Sullivan's blog accounted for roughly a quarter of TheAtlantic.com's monthly unique visitors, which reached 4.8 million last October.

Mr. Sullivan's work will be promoted on The Daily Beast's home page, and he will contribute to the ailing Newsweek magazine, Ms. Brown said.

After Newsweek merged with The Daily Beast in November 2010, Ms. Brown, who previously led Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, was given the task of turning both publications into money-making ventures. The addition of Mr. Sullivan to the roster, Ms. Brown said, "will give The Dish a whole new audience and potential for growth and innovation."

The date for the first issue of the revamped Newsweek has not been revealed, but one person briefed on the plan said last week that March 7 was the target.

I trust that for DWT readers it's not necessary to pile on the snark regarding these two acquisitions. Andrew Sullivan is a very bright fellow, but "very bright" doesn't impress me in the absence of, well, something else. True, every now and then -- every 50th time out of the box? 100th? 500th? -- he uses that brightness to offer genuine insight on a topic, but I don't have the spare reading time to play those odds.

As for Howie the Hump, well, what is there to say? If he had been maybe 100 times as competent in his career at the Post he might have qualified as a disgrace. Of course the paper should have been profoundly ashamed of him, but it has long since lost any sense of shame it may once have possessed in its somewhat happier times. Actually, my favorite line in Mr. Tumolillo's breathless account is the idea that our Howie, in making the move to Ms. Tina's house of media, aspires to be "more of an entrepreneur online." Shake it, Howie baby!

From these thrilling announcements out of Ms. Tina's PR pantry, I have two takeaways -- one fairly conclusive, the other merely speculative.

(1) The conclusive one is that neither The Daily Beast nor the new Newsweek is meant for me. Which is A-OK by me. I'm already way overcommitted media-wise.

(2) The speculation is that Ms. Tina's new media empire may be headed for something less than blockbusterdom. I mean, Howie the Hump and Andrew "Look at Me!" Sullivan? If this were some 17-year-old whiz kid in, say, Nebraska making the leap from his high school newspaper to a national media presence, names like this might confer some measure of "credibility." But are there really more people out there than I'm imagining whose heartbeat is racing at the prospect of, um, still being able to read these humps, only now in The Daily Beast and Newsweek?

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