Newsweek Merges With Tina Brown's Daily Beast Website

Newsweek, the venerable but declining news magazine, has joined forces with the new media by merging with the Daily Beast, a politics-oriented website co-founded by its celebrity editor, Tina Brown.

Called the Newsweek Daily Beast Co., the joint venture was announced Friday by IAC, the Barry Diller company that owns the Daily Beast, which is less than two years old.

Newsweek, a 77-year-old publication once ubiquitous on coffee tables from coast to coast, was purchased last summer by communications equipment magnate Sidney Harman for $1 from the Washington Post Co. The magazine, which built its reputation as an authoritative quick-read, struggled to keep current in the highly competitive digital age and was losing money. It is not clear how revenue will be divided in the new venture.

Brown, who previously edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker and once wrote a column for the Post, compared the merger between old and new to a "wedding" and said it was greeted with a "coffee-mug toast between all parties" at Beast headquarters in downtown Manhattan. "I shall now be in the editor-in-chief's chair at both the Daily Beast and Newsweek," she said in a posting.