New York | Tuesday, July 24th, 2012
The estate of late billionaire Sidney Harman announced that it will no longer invest in Newsweek Daily Beast Co a year after Harman’s death, leaving mogul Barry Diller’s IAC/InteractiveCorp with a controlling stake in the beleaguered media company. Harman acquired the venerable but tattered Newsweek in August 2010, when the company was losing a reported $30 million annually. Three months later he agreed to merge the print magazine with The Daily Beast, a web upstart launched by Diller and headed by Tina Brown, who had previously reinvented the New Yorker and Vanity Fair.
The Old-New Media symbiosis hasn’t quite worked out; reports estimatethis year’s losses at $30 million, a figure Brown deems excessive. Harman’s widow Jane will remain on the company board and attend media functions and conferences as Newsweek Daily Best continues to try to leverage buzz into a cash flow.
[Source: Reuters]
