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The Beast's Roar Fades
By Leela de Kretser
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Posted Feb 4, 09 10:50 AM CST
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(Newser)
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Is media darling Tina Brown headed for another disaster? That's what the Observer is asking, noting that traffic to the celebrity editor's website dropped 17% after its glitzy launch last fall. Despite a start-up budget said to be as high as $18 million, and a staff of 24, the Daily Beast is now enticing fewer visitors than its far leaner rival—your very own Newser.
"We’ve built something that is ‘this is your daily news’ rather than something where you come to us on a purely event basis,” Newser founder Michael Wolff told the Observer. “Her thing is much more something that you go to because Chris Buckley has said something audacious. From my understanding, she shoehorned herself into this business by being an aggregator, but she really wants to run things like how she would run a magazine.”