Despite the commercial success of her bestselling book on the Princess of Wales, the Diana Chronicles, the Talk debacle still hangs over her and adds an edginess to this week’s launch of her Internet magazine. Forget the mistitle — will the Daily Beast prove as costly a mistake for its backer, Barry Diller of IAC, as Talk did for Miramax?
In the first two days she has demonstrated she has lost none of her talent for creating a stir. The Web was buzzing — to use her own favorite phrase — with chatter about a spiky profile of Jennifer Lopez that alleged she had suffered a form of nervous breakdown. Elle had turned the article down for being too unflattering. Brown snapped it up instead.
The site seeks to help readers through the clutter and cacophony of the Web with its own digest of the best reads of the day, supplemented by its own commissions from writers, politicians and household names. Jeremy Gilbert, a Web designer who teaches at the Medill School of Journalism, thinks she will have a steep learning curve as an Internet publisher. “I’m not alone in being a little unsure about what the Daily Beast is trying to do. It doesn’t have the political slant of the Huffington Post and it doesn’t make many concessions to the online format.”
So the jury is out on the Beast and its celebrity editor. She clearly relishes the challenge, though only time will tell whether the medium matches or overwhelms the scale of her ambitions.
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