Monday, February 28, 2011

A marriage made in a marketing firm

Now that Huffington Post is owned by AOL, other media outlets seem to be scaling up. Tina Brown's Daily Beast has teamed up with the bankrupt Newsweek, and now Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish has signed up with The Daily Beast.

Sullivan started as an independent blogger, then squatted at Time for a while, then shilled for The Atlantic, and now joins the Newsweek orbit. But has had really big numbers, and that seems to be the goal- lots of eyeballs.

The sad part is there'll be less of Sullivan and more written by his little band of elves. It's going more and more corporate.

The media's been this way before. At the height of the Internet boom, AOL and Time-Warner engineered a gigantic merger promising all kinds of inter-media "synergies." After Tina Brown left The New Yorker she started a magazine called Talk that was aligned in vague, synergistic ways with Miramax and some book publishers to cross-promote movie, book and magazine content. Latterly at The Atlantic, Sullivan pulled together reader contributions (free) into book formats and then sold them back to readers. None so queer as folk, as they say back in his home country: everywhere he's found a corporate patron, Sullivan has extolled them, and peddled them and gushed over their kindnesses- and then left them.

Talk lasted two years.
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