Does the world really need another news aggregator Web site? Tina Brown poses this question to introduce her new site, the Daily Beast. Brown, formerly the editor at Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Talk magazines, launched the Daily Beast earlier this week.
Brown says the site will be more than just an aggregator (naturally). She writes, “[The Daily Beast] is a speedy, smart edit of the Web from the merciless point of view of what interests the editors … The Daily Beast doesn’t aggregate. It sifts, sorts, and curates. We’re as much about what’s not there as what is.”
I spent a day with the site, reading most of the content and getting used to the site’s interface. Is Brown’s staff executing her editorial goals so far?
The site has a spiffy design, with a feel that’s more magazine than Web site. Unlike other aggregators, the Daily Beast doesn’t overwhelm you with text. And unlike the Huffington Post, it’s look is more polished.
The strength of the site comes from one of its four main components: “The Big Fat Story.” Here, editors select a “story of the day” to feature, with six articles drawn from a wide variety of sources designed to give readers an overview of the topic. The Daily Beast’s first “fat” story focused on Bill Ayers, “pal” of Barack Obama’s and former domestic terrorist, who has been mentioned frequently by Republicans on the campaign trail during the past few weeks. The stories include a biography of Ayers, a piece questioning the New York Times‘ recent Obama/Ayers story, and links to Obama’s Web site for an official response.
Readers seek out aggregators that have a sensibility close to theirs, whether it be the Drudge Report or Digg. The benefit of the Big Fat Story is it allows readers to make up their own minds about a hot story … to a degree, of course. Readers have to trust Daily Beast editors are providing them with a variety of sources.
One criticism of aggregators is they might whittle the “whole” Internet down some, but there’s still a lot of content to sift through. The Daily Beast has an answer to that complaint with its “Cheat Sheet” page, a list of fewer than 20 stories generated each day and designed to give readers a “best of the best of the best” of stories and other content available online. Examples from Thursday’s list: A story from the Times about the bailout, and clips from Michelle Obama on “The Daily Show.”
Reading through the list of Cheat Sheet stories, it’s clear the Daily Beast doesn’t yet quite know what type of animal it wants to be. Should it be snarky? Funny? Focusing on the weird minutia of the Internet? The problem is there are already aggregators for all those types of news requirements, so it isn’t clear how the Daily Beast is going to stand out in this notoriously crowded marketplace.
Similar to the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast will have a stable of columnists with their own blogs, plus original reporting (all included under the “Blogs & Stories” header). Already the site has created buzz by running a spiked Jennifer Lopez profile, where the singer and actress appeared disheveled and talked about her recent nervous breakdown. Michael Kinsley, Slate founder and Time magazine columnist, added to the lore about John McCain’s temper when he retold a story for his blog about the senator blowing up at a craps table in Puerto Rico.
Tina Brown isn’t being accused of publishing the Daily Beast for selfish and superficial reasons, unlike Arianna Huffington when she started her eponymous site. But HuffPo is now a well-established Internet entity, and the Daily Beast has a ways to go. In today’s cluttered Internet, even the aggregators need to stand out. The Daily Beast hasn’t distinguished itself yet.
Tags: Huffington Post, news aggregator, the daily beast, tina brown