Tina Brown may not be with The Daily Beast much longer.
The Daily Beast's parent company, IAC, has decided not to renew Brown's contract at the title when it expires in January. The news was first reported by BuzzFeed, and confirmed by Mashable at a source within the company. Politico also confirmed the report, saying that Brown is set to launch her own company, Tina Brown Live Media, which will expand on her Women in the World conference series and also include flash debates.
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A spokesperson for The Daily Beast did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Daily Beast launched under Brown and IAC in fall 2008. It was, at first, like a free, web-only version of Vanity Fair, the Conde Nast title Brown used to edit. Brown discovered quickly that longform features weren't going to generate enough revenue to support The Daily Beast alone, and today it balances a mix of original reports with aggregated stories and slideshows, bringing in about 6 million unique visitors per month, per comScore. It is still not, however, profitable. According to Adweek, the publication is slated to lose $12 million this year.
Brown's tenure at The Daily Beast — and later at Newsweek, which merged with The Daily Beast in late 2010 and was sold off earlier this year — has been fraught with drama, both internal and external. She has famously clashed with editors and reporters, and been criticized for a series of Newsweek covers, like this one of a back-from-the-dead Princess Diana, for seeming "desperate."
The future of The Daily Beast is uncertain. BuzzFeed speculates that the publication could be sold, closed (unlikely, in my opinion, given the audience size and brand equity at stake) or continue to run under a new editor — perhaps Executive Editor John Avlon.
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