Ms. Brown announced Wednesday that she would step down as editor in chief of the Web site The Daily Beast and start her own conference company.
The departure will end, for now, her career as one of the magazine industry’s best-known editors, one who received much acclaim for her stewardship of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, then had less success with Talk magazine and the merger of The Daily Beast and Newsweek.
It will also end her publishing partnership with her financial backer, Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, which began in 2008 when the two joined to found The Daily Beast.
Ms. Brown, 59, said in a statement that she would start Tina Brown Live Media, which will focus on building up the Women in the World conferences she has been organizing and running for several years.
At a meeting with Daily Beast staff members on Wednesday, Ms. Brown said that she would remain until the end of the year, when her contract expires.
“It has been wonderful to grow the Women in the World summit into such a powerful, independent brand within The Daily Beast, and now it will be even more exciting to see how it can expand and develop,” Ms. Brown said in the statement.
An executive with direct knowledge of the negotiations said her split with Mr. Diller was friendly, and that she had been saying for more than a month that she did not want to continue in such a stressful position into the new year.
It is unclear what Ms. Brown’s departure means for the future of The Daily Beast. The Web site has lost millions of dollars since its inception, though Ms. Brown had projected that it would break even long before now. The executive, speaking on condition of anonymity because Ms. Brown was handling the public announcement, said it was unlikely the Web site would be closed.
Ms. Brown said The Daily Beast “has given me some of the most exciting and fulfilling years of my professional life,” adding that she was “enormously proud” of what the Web site had achieved.
News of Ms. Brown’s decision was first reported by the Web site BuzzFeed.
Ms. Brown and Mr. Diller expressed great enthusiasm when they started The Daily Beast in 2008. But their relationship was put to the test in 2010 when Ms. Brown persuaded Mr. Diller to help support the storied but struggling Newsweek magazine and merge it with The Daily Beast. Even Ms. Brown’s best efforts to save Newsweek were soured by the struggling market for newsmagazines, and Newsweek lost tens of millions of dollars.
Mr. Diller complained publicly for months about his frustrations with Newsweek, and referred to the acquisition of it as a “mistake.” Late in 2012, Ms. Brown announced that Newsweek would cease publishing a print edition. In May, Ms. Brown confirmed that the magazine was for sale, and in early August Newsweek was sold to the digital news company International Business Times.
Though Ms. Brown drew praise from many current and former employees, she made her share of critics as she tried to steer Newsweek through a turbulent time in the media industry. Dan Lyons, Newsweek’s former technology editor, wrote on Facebook Wednesday: “At rows of desks, reporters and editors pretend to stare at screens, while fighting the urge to jump and start dancing and cheering.”
Ms. Brown has been hosting the Women in the World conferences for the last three years along with Mr. Diller’s wife, Diane von Furstenberg, and the actress Meryl Streep. She is taking her events group, which is headed by Kathy O’Hearn, from The Daily Beast to help her with her conferences.
Ms. Brown worked with Anita Dunn, a former White House communications director for President Obama, to manage her announcement Wednesday, suggesting that in the future Ms. Brown may pay far more attention to Washington political circles than to the New York publishing world she is leaving behind.
It appears that Ms. Brown will continue to have some ties with The Daily Beast and IAC even in her conference business. In her statement, Ms. Brown said The Daily Beast would remain a media partner for the April 2014 conference.
Leslie Kaufman and David Carr contributed reporting.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/business/media/tina-brown-to-leave-daily-beast-to-focus-on-conferences.html?partner=rss&emc=rss