The Daily Beast

Launching on October 6, 2008, news site The Daily Beast was thrust towards news junkies everywhere; much to the chagrin of popular online-news favorite, the Huffington Post. It was a joint venture between famed magazine editor Tina Brown and billionaire Barry Diller of InterActiveCorp. Together they created a news site which is now acclimated for mixing original reporting with celebrity gossip, photography; high brow sophistication and snarky opinionated blogging. The website has a clean red/black and white design that is aided by surprisingly uncluttered online advertising.

Co-creator Tina Brown is already a superstar in her own right. Brown started her career in the news room as a journalist and columnist,. Born a British citizen, she did not became a United States citizen untill 2005. Brown graduated St Anne's College, Oxford in 1974. It would be amiss to go without mentioning her spunky spirit that resonated even in her early years of education, as she was kicked out of no more than three boarding schools for dissidence.

In 1973 she won the Pakenham Award for the best young journalist. The Sunday Times called her the Most Promising Female Journalist, and in March 1974, the British edition of Cosmopolitan magazine described her as a "stunning twenty-year-old playwright." Brown was mainly writing at the time for wrote Punch magazine; reporting from New York. In 1978 the magazine gave her the Young Journalist of the Year Award. That same year she quit to join Harold Evans at The Sunday Telegraph in London.

She became the editor-in-chief of Tatler magazine at the age of 25 and In 1992, Brown started working as editor for the New Yorker but receive much criticism during her time there. She was accused of obliterating the old model the New Yorker by Brown using more photography and shorter articles. Over all Brown’s controversial ways increased circulation by 30 percent, adding 250,000 new readers. Brown continued to quickly rise up the literary ladder (as far as American media industry goes) as the editor of the magazines Vanity Fair from 1984 to 1992 and of The New Yorker from 1992 to 1998.

In 1999 Brown launched Talk magazine, but due to a dwindling demand for print publications it had to close it down in 2001. The collapse of Talk in 2001 could of smeared her reputation as an editor with the Midas touch but she quickly regained steam upon hosting Topic A with Tina Brown., a news show on CNBC. Brown also wrote for The Washington Post and The New York Sun on occasion. In 2007, she was named to the Magazine Editors Hall of Fame. She has also been honored with four George Polk Awards, five Overseas Press Club awards, and ten National Magazine Awards. She and her husband, Harold Evans, who was the editor at The London Times and editorial director at U.S. News & World Report, have two children.

As for the beast, the name of the site stems from Brown's favorite novel, Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. The Beast is positioned somewhere in the middle of the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, both in terms of content and political placement. Politically, it seeks a non-partisan tone, in contrast to the snarky right winged attitude of Drudge and the unabashed liberalism of Huffington Post. I feel it has more original content than Drudge - But like Drudge it also acts as an aggregator, linking to stories of the day as chosen by its small team of editors under its motto "Read this, skip that." It is the perfect way to give you a synopsis of the story, and then the link to go get more if you feel so inclined; which is ideal for ADD online reader, such as me =)