The Daily Beast

• 1. A Name From Fiction

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  The Daily Beast took its name from a fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop. The real Daily Beast, an American news website covering politics, media and pop culture, began publishing on the 6th of October 2008. A name borrowed from a made-up paper suggests an outfit that wants to be quick, loud and a little mischievous. Over the following years the site chased scoops and scandals, and it also became the subject of several. Who built it, and how did its editors describe what they were doing? How far did its audience grow, and what prizes did it collect? And what happened when its own reporting drew the kind of fire it usually aimed at others?

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• 2. Founding and Merger

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  Tina Brown was the founding editor of The Daily Beast. She arrived with a background in glossy magazines, having edited both Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. She had also led Talk, a magazine with a short life.

  In 2010, the site merged with the magazine Newsweek, and the two formed a joint company called The Newsweek Daily Beast Company. The partnership lasted three years. In 2013, the site's owner, IAC Inc., sold Newsweek to IBT Media, the owner of the International Business Times.

  Brown stepped down as editor in September 2013. Her successor was John Avlon, an American journalist, political commentator and CNN contributor, who took the titles of editor-in-chief and managing director. He would hold them for five years, and his interviews would supply many of the site's best-known descriptions of itself.

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• 3. Editorial Voice

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  In a 2015 interview, John Avlon laid out what the Beast went looking for. He said: "We seek out scoops, scandals, and stories about secret worlds; we love confronting bullies, bigots, and hypocrites." Three years later he shrank the formula to a "strike zone" of "politics, pop culture, and power."

  In April 2018, Avlon described the site's politics as "non-partisan but not neutral." That meant hitting both sides where appropriate, he explained, without "mythic moral equivalence on every issue." A year earlier, on a podcast from the Poynter Institute, he had put it more bluntly: "We're not going to toe any partisan line."

  In December 2017, NPR reported that Avlon had started pairing reporters from the political right and left on White House stories. The two assigned to the first Trump administration were Asawin Suebsaeng, formerly of Mother Jones, and Lachlan Markay, formerly of The Heritage Foundation.

  The Atlantic called the site's stance liberal leaning in 2024, and GBH News had used the same description in 2012. Business Insider called the newsroom left-leaning.

  In 2018, Erik Wemple, the media critic of The Washington Post, judged the site an "impressive operation" pound for pound. He said the staff work the phones, do not always chase the story everyone else is chasing, and are fast. Later that year, editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman gave his own label, calling the Beast a "high-end tabloid" that embraces gonzo journalism.

  Shachtman also described the social media policy for journalists, as of 2018, in three rules. The first was "you're reporters, not cheerleaders," meaning no open partisanship. The second was to avoid hate speech and posts that could offend a group. The third was blunt: "don't get your fellow reporters in trouble."

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• 4. The Cheat Sheet and Beyond

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  The Cheat Sheet, billed as "must reads from all over," ran throughout the day on the site. It offered a selection of articles from other online news outlets on popular stories. Each entry carried a brief summary and a link to the full text on the provider's own website. It lived at www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet.

  After launch, the site added a video Cheat Sheet and a books section called Book Beast. It also built landing pages on topical subjects, among them President Obama's inauguration, the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme and the Iran uprising.

  In 2014, the site reached a mobile majority and released an iOS app. Nieman Lab described the app as "the dawn of the quantified news reader." The artwork at the top of every article had its own label, "jaunty collage and pop-art illustrations."

  In September 2009, the site launched a publishing arm called Beast Books, meant to produce books by its writers on an accelerated schedule. The first was John Avlon's Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America. In January 2011 came Stephen L. Carter's The Violence of Peace: America's Wars in the Age of Obama. Also in 2011, Beast Books published Mighty Be Our Powers, a memoir by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee.

  The roster of contributors included Martin Amis, P. J. O'Rourke, Christopher Buckley, Michelle Goldberg, Olivia Nuzzi and Meghan McCain. In May 2017, Spencer Ackerman, a national security reporter who had won a Pulitzer Prize, left The Guardian for the Beast. The next month, HuffPost senior political editor Sam Stein announced he was joining in the same role.

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• 5. Readers and Prizes

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  In early June 2014, Capital New York republished a memo from the outgoing CEO, Rhona Murphy. It said average monthly unique visitors had climbed from 13.5 million in 2013 to more than 17 million in 2014. By September 2014 the site hit a record 21 million unique visitors, a 60% rise on the year before. Its social media community had grown by 300%.

  In 2015, Ken Doctor of Nieman Lab called the site one of the fastest-growing news and information sites year over year in the General News category. During Avlon's years in charge, from 2013 to 2018, traffic doubled to 1.1 million readers a day, and the site won more than 17 awards. Harvard University estimated its monthly audience at 33.83 million users.

  The Daily Beast won the Webby Award for Best News Site in both 2012 and 2013. In 2012, Avlon took the National Society of Newspaper Columnists award for best online column. In March 2012, Book Beast won a National Magazine Award in the Website Department category.

  In 2015, Anna Nemstova received the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation. Michael Daly won a National Society of Newspaper Columnists award that year for online work. In 2016, the Los Angeles Press Club nominated several Beast writers, and the Association of LGBTQ Journalists named Tim Teeman a nominee for Journalist of the Year.

  In 2017, the site won three New York Press Club awards, in Entertainment News, Crime Reporting and Travel Reporting. In December, the Los Angeles Press Club gave it four awards for 2017 reporting. Those included investigative articles about the Nate Parker rape case and comic Bob Smith's struggle with ALS, plus a remembrance of Bill Paxton. In 2018, the trade magazine Digiday named the Cheat Sheet the best email newsletter.

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• 6. Retractions and Apologies

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  In February 2010, Jack Shafer of Slate reported that Gerald Posner, the chief investigative reporter of The Daily Beast, had plagiarized five sentences from a Miami Herald article. Shafer found more borrowing from a Miami Herald blog, a Miami Herald editorial, Texas Lawyer magazine and a health care journalism blog. After an internal review, Posner was dismissed.

  On the 11th of August 2016, the site published an article titled "I Got Three Grindr Dates in an Hour in the Olympic Village." Its author was Nico Hines, the London editor, who had been assigned to cover the Olympic Games. Hines, a heterosexual married man, signed up for dating apps including Tinder, Bumble and Grindr and wrote about the results. He named no one, but his details were enough to identify individual athletes. Critics warned that the information could be used against closeted gay athletes, especially those living in repressive countries.

  Faced with intense backlash online, the site edited out the identifying details, and John Avlon added a lengthy editor's note. The criticism went on, and the article was eventually removed entirely, followed by an apology. Hines issued his own formal apology in March 2017. The site's editor announced that he would return "following a lengthy period of intense reflection."

  Andrew M. Seaman, ethics committee chair of the Society of Professional Journalists, called the piece "journalistic trash, unethical and dangerous." The National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association said the reporting was "extremely careless of individual privacy and potentially dangerous to the athletes." Vince Gonzales, a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, wrote that it "borders on journalistic malpractice." Sarah Kate Ellis, president of GLAAD, wrote of "a complete lack of judgment and disregard for basic decency."

  Amini Fonua, a swimmer who represented Tonga at the Rio games, called the article "deplorable." He pointed out that being gay is still illegal in Tonga and that not everyone is strong enough to be open about it.

  In August 2021, an article criticizing Mayim Bialik's appointment as the new host of Jeopardy! described the Israel Defense Forces as "genocidal." After human rights lawyers and members of the Jewish community objected, the Beast removed the word. It said it would review its editorial policy on the use of the term "genocide."

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• 7. The Pelosi Video Dispute

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  In June 2019, Beast reporter Kevin Poulsen was accused of doxing Shawn Brooks, a 34-year-old Trump supporter living in the Bronx. Poulsen had identified Brooks as the alleged creator and spreader of a widely shared fake video of the American politician Nancy Pelosi, in which she appeared to speak in a slurred manner. The video had been shared more than 60,000 times on Facebook and had over 4 million views. It also spread to Twitter and YouTube.

  Brooks denied making the video. He admitted being one of the administrators of Politics WatchDog, the group that first posted it, and he blamed a "female admin." He said he would sue the Beast and Poulsen for publishing "inaccurate trash," and he opened a GoFundMe page with a goal of $10,000. By the morning of the 3rd of June 2019, he had raised more than $4,400.

  Glenn Greenwald, a co-founder of The Intercept, wrote on Twitter that it was "repellent to unleash the resources of a major news outlet on an obscure, anonymous, powerless, quasi-unemployed citizen." Yashar Ali, a contributor to HuffPost and New York, said the story "sets a really bad precedent when a private citizen has their identity publicly revealed." On the 3rd of June, Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire told viewers of The Ingraham Angle that he doubted Facebook should be handing anonymous posters' information to media outlets.

  Michael Tracey, a freelance journalist, attacked "self-aggrandizing, sleazy, click-chasing Daily Beast journalists." Jon Levine of TheWrap called the article a "hit job over a joke video that happened to go viral."

  On the 2nd of June 2019, CNN's Brian Stelter put these criticisms to Noah Shachtman on Reliable Sources. Shachtman defended the story. He said the fake video had reached "the highest levels of power, with Rudy Giuliani himself tweeting it out," which made its creator worth identifying. He added that Poulsen had spoken with Brooks in an on-the-record interview that lasted an hour.

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• 8. Leaders and Lawsuits

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  In March 2017, Mike Dyer, the former chief strategy and product officer, left the Beast for Intel. In May 2017, Heather Dietrick was appointed president and publisher. A year later, in May 2018, John Avlon departed to become a full-time senior political analyst and anchor at CNN. Executive editor Noah Shachtman took his place.

  In 2020, the journalist Carson Griffith sued The Daily Beast, staff writer Maxwell Tani and Shachtman for defamation. The suit targeted an article alleging that she had made offensive comments in her role at Gawker. On the 24th of March 2021, a trial court judge denied a motion to dismiss. On the 9th of August 2022, another judge denied a motion to dismiss under New York's recently amended anti-SLAPP law. On the 16th of May 2023, a New York appeals court dismissed the lawsuit.

  In July 2021, Shachtman announced that he was moving to Rolling Stone. Tracy Connor was named to succeed him.

  In January 2023, The New York Times reported that IAC chairman Barry Diller was weighing a sale of the Beast. In June 2023, Diller publicly said he had ended talks to sell and that the site was "not for sale."

  In April 2024, Diller hired Ben Sherwood as chief executive and publisher. He also brought in Joanna Coles to a senior creative post. In May, employees were offered voluntary buyouts to cut costs. About 70% of unionized workers accepted, and almost all of the Beast's senior staffers were among them.

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