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Struggling Newsweek joins with fledgling website Daily Beast

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The Daily Beast Web site and Newsweek magazine will announce Friday that they are teaming in a joint venture aimed at giving the ailing newsmagazine some new-media energy and the fledgling Web site a modicum of old-media credibility.

The combined entity, to be called the Newsweek Daily Beast Co., will be under the editorial direction of the Daily Beast’s editor, Tina Brown, who was the top editor at Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and the defunct Talk magazine; she is also a former columnist for The Washington Post’s Style section.

Under the new structure, Newsweek will remain a printed weekly magazine, but its Web operations will be incorporated into the Daily Beast’s Web site, according to the announcement.

The Daily Beast — which takes its name from British novelist Evelyn Waugh’s satire of British newspapers, “Scoop” — is a two-year-old news and commentary Web site. It is owned by IAC Corp., the Internet conglomerate headed by Barry Diller that owns dozens of Web sites, including CollegeHumor.com, the search engine Ask.com and the popular dating site Match.com.

For years, Newsweek, like other venerable newsmagazines, has been losing advertising support as well as circulation, which in 2008 dipped below 3 million. Audio-components mogul Sidney Harman bought the publication from The Washington Post Co. in August for a symbolic $1, plus the assumption of about $47 million in liabilities. Newsweek had operating losses of $28.1 million in 2009.

Full story: Struggling Newsweek joins with fledgling Web site Daily Beast

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