The Daily Beast

History

The Daily Beast began publishing on October 6, 2008, The Beast's founding editor was Tina Brown, a former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker as well as the short-lived Talk Magazine. Brown stepped down as editor in September 2013. John Avlon, an American journalist and political commentator as well as a CNN contributor, is the site's editor in chief. Mike Dyer is chief strategy and product officer, and Sarah Chubb serves as senior adviser.

The name of the site was taken from a fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop.

Plagiarism

In February 2010, Jack Shafer of Slate.com claimed that the chief investigative reporter for The Daily Beast, Gerald Posner, had lifted five sentences from a Miami Herald article and claimed that he had written them himself and was able to publish them in The Daily Beast under his own name. Shafer also discovered that Posner had written plagiarized content from a Miami Herald blog, a Miami Herald editorial, Texas Lawyer magazine and a health care journalism blog. An immediate internal investigation by The Daily Beast led to Posner's dismissal.

Merger

On November 12, 2010, The Daily Beast and Newsweek announced a merger deal, creating a combined company, The Newsweek Daily Beast Company. On August 3, 2013, IAC, owner of The Daily Beast, sold Newsweek (without "The Daily Beast") to IBT Media, owner of the International Business Times. In September 2014, one year after Tina Brown's departure was announced, The Daily Beast reached a new record of 21 million unique visitors—a 60% year-over-year increase in readers, accompanied by a 300% increase in the overall size of its social media community. In 2015, Ken Doctor, a news analyst for Nieman Lab, reported on Capital New York that The Daily Beast is "one of the fastest-growing news and information sites year-over-year in the 'General News' category".

Nico Hine's 2016 Olympics Grindr article

On August 11, 2016, The Daily Beast published an article titled "I Got Three Grindr Dates in an Hour in the Olympic Village", written by Nico Hines, the site's London editor, who was assigned to cover the Olympic Games. Hines, a straight married man, signed up for several gay and straight dating apps, including Tinder, Bumble and Grindr, and documented his experiences in the Olympic Village. While not specifically naming names, Hines provided enough detail in the article to identify individual athletes, leading to widespread criticism that this information could be used against closeted gay athletes, especially those living in repressive countries. Facing intense backlash online, the Daily Beast edited the piece to remove details that could allow athletes to be identified, and editor in chief John Avlon added a lengthy editor's note. Criticism challenging the value of the piece continued, and the Daily Beast eventually removed the article altogether and issued an apology.

Andrew M Seaman, ethics committee chair for the Society of Professional Journalists, called the article "journalistic trash, unethical and dangerous". The National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association stated "The reporting was unethical, extremely careless of individual privacy and potentially dangerous to the athletes". Vince Gonzales, professor of professional practice at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism wrote "I think this borders on journalistic malpractice". President of GLAAD, Sarah Kate Ellis, wrote "How this reporter thought it was OK—or that somehow it was in the public's interest—to write about his deceitful encounters with these men reflects a complete lack of judgment and disregard for basic decency, not to mention the ethics of journalism".

False accusations of Trump support

On August 15, 2016, the Daily Beast published an article by James Kirchick which listed Corey Robin, Glenn Greenwald, Ishaan Tharoor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and others as "Hillary Clinton-Loathing, Donald Trump-Loving Useful Idiots of the Left." Salon's Ben Norton contacted all of those who were mentioned in the article. All of them except for one stated they did not support Trump. Jeet Heer, a senior editor at The New Republic, tweeted "Um, none of the people are Trump admirers." Scholar of Russian studies Stephen Cohen accused Kirchick of using "McCarthy-like slurs" in order "to shut off any substantial debate about foreign policy" Journalist Rania Khalek added, "The suggestion that I harbor admiration for Trump is an incredible smear ... Trump is an unhinged and dangerous demagogue who is whipping up fascist sentiments that should concern us all." Christopher Ketcham, who was the exception, stated he supported Trump because he felt his ethics and behavior most closely represented the United States true values. Kirchick, who has been referred to as a "Clinton-supporting neoconservative", spoke of her as "the candidate of the status quo" and "2016's real conservative".

Format

A feature of The Daily Beast is the "Cheat Sheet", billed as "must reads from all over". Published throughout the day, the Cheat Sheet offers a selection of articles from online news outlets on popular stories. The Cheat Sheet includes brief summaries of the article, and a link to read the full text of the article on the website of its provider.

Since the launch, the site has introduced additional sections, including a video Cheat Sheet and Book Beast. The site frequently creates encyclopedic landing pages on topical subjects such as President Obama's inauguration, the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, Michael Jackson, the Iran uprising, and the US Open. In 2014, The Daily Beast became majority mobile and released an iOS app, which Nieman Lab described as "the dawn of the quantified news reader".

Contributors to the publication include notable writers and political activists such as Ana Marie Cox, P. J. O'Rourke, Maajid Nawaz, Olivia Nuzzi, Mike Barnicle, Noah Shachtman, Michael Tomasky, David Frum, Stuart Stevens, Meghan McCain, Peter Beinart, Jon Favreau, Kirsten Powers, Daniel Gross, Michael Moynihan, Jamelle Bouie, Michael Daly, Lloyd Grove, Daniel Klaidman, Jackie Kucinich, Christopher Dickey, Leslie H. Gelb, Dean Obeidallah, Matt K. Lewis, Ron Christie, Josh Rogin, Eli Lake, Nick Romeo, Christopher Buckley, Bernard Henri Levy, Eleanor Clift, Patricia Murphy, Michelle Goldberg, Martin Amis, John Avlon, Joshua Dubois, Joy-Ann Reid, Goldie Taylor, Michael Weiss and others, including Brown herself.

Popularity

In early June 2014, Capital New York re-published a memo by outgoing CEO Rhona Murphy, stating that The Daily Beast's average unique monthly visitors increased from 13.5 million in 2013 to more than 17 million in 2014. Editor-in-Chief John Avlon announced in his column at the end of 2016 that they had doubled their traffic from four years before and reached more than one million readers a day.

Awards

The Daily Beast won a Webby Award for "Best News Site" in 2012 and 2013. Also in 2012 John Avlon won National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ award for best online column in 2012 for The Daily Beast.

Anna Nemstova received the Courage in Journalism Award in 2015 from the International Women's Media Foundation. Also that year, Michael Daly won with the National Society of Newspaper Columnists award in the category of Online, Blog, Multimedia – Over 100,000 Unique Visitors.

In 2016 The Los Angeles Press Club nominated several of The Beast’s writers including M.L. Nestel for Arts/Entertainment Investigative, Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins for best Celebrity Investigative, Malcolm Jones for best Obituary, Lizzie Crocker for Humor and Tim Teeman for Industry/ArtsHard News. Also nominated for best in field were Kevin Fallon for Industry/Arts Soft News and Melissa Leon for Industry/Arts Soft News.

The Association of LGBTQ Journalists or NLGJA nominated both Tim Teeman 2016 Journalist of the Year and Heather Boerner Excellence in HIV/AIDS Coverage.

Beast Books

In September 2009, The Daily Beast launched a publishing initiative entitled "Beast Books" that will produce books by Beast writers on an accelerated publishing schedule. In March 2013, "Beast Books," now operating under the name "Book Beast," won a National Magazine Award for Website Department, which "Honors a department, channel or microsite."

Ownership

The Daily Beast is owned by IAC, where the vice chairman of the Clinton Foundation, Chelsea Clinton, serves on the board of directors.