The Daily Beast

The Daily Beast is subsidized by IAC/InterActiveCorp. The site receives nearly 20 million unique visitors a month, most of whom access the site from mobile devices. In 2014 over half of the Beast’s revenue was acquired from content marketing. The Daily Beast’s sale of Newsweek in August 2013 generated a $6.3 million profit, but was followed by lower revenue and increased losses for the parent company’s media segment.

A combination of "high-low" journalism, the Beast seeks to cover "politics, Hollywood and war." In the words of Avlon, "We seek out scoops, scandals and stories about secret worlds."

Founded in 2008 by Diller and magazine editor Tina Brown, it was named after the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel ‘Scoop.’ The ‘Beast’ of the novel is a parody on the Daily Mail, and Waugh used it to satirize sensationalist journalism.

In 2010, Brown merged the Beast with Newsweek magazine. Following Brown’s departure in 2013, Newsweek was sold to International Business Times. Under the leadership of Avlon and Mike Dyer, the Beast has focused on mobile content and catering to younger audiences.

Editor-in-chief, educated at Yale and Columbia. He joined the Daily Beast in 2008, shortly after its launch. Before that, Avlon worked as a columnist and associate editor for the New York Sun, and speechwriter and Deputy Communications Director for New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Avlon became interim executive editor of the Beast in 2013, and was promoted to editor-in-chief in January 2014.

Avlon has also been a political analyst for CNN, where in 2009 he created a segment called ‘Wingnuts of the Week’ for the show American Morning. He defined ‘wingnuts’ as extremists who seek to divide rather than unite, the "professional partisans and the unhinged activists, the hardcore haters and the paranoid conspiracy theorists." In 2010, Avlon published ‘Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America,’ with a foreword by Tina Brown. An updated edition of the book, titled ‘Wingnuts: Extremism in the Age of Obama’ came out in 2014.

In 2009, Avlon married Margaret Hoover, former George W. Bush staffer and Giuliani campaigner. Hoover is the granddaughter of late US President Herbert Hoover, a frequent CNN and Fox News commentator, and an outspoken gay rights advocate. She published one article on the Daily Beast in 2010, headlined ‘The Return of Big Government.’

In 2010, Avlon helped found the political nonprofit No Labels, bringing together Republican, Democrat and independent members of the governing establishment as a "voice of the silent majority" wanting to "make the government work again."

In 2012, he received the award for best online column by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

In a 2011 CNN column, Avlon defended President Obama against both liberal and conservative critics of the intervention in Libya, quoting approvingly from his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: "I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war."

In a January 2013 Daily Beast column, Avlon argued the cause of the Republicans’ 2012 defeat was the strategy of catering to the party base, rather than the northeastern elite. He urged the party to woo back the New York and New England Republicans, holding up New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as an example.

Mike Dyer is co-managing director and chief product and strategy officer with the Daily Beast and has a background in digital advertising. His first assignment at the Daily Beast was coming up with a digital version of Newsweek, but after the magazine was sold off in 2013, Dyer focused on developing sponsored content to make the Daily Beast profitable.

"It’s as important to talk about the business from a behavioral point of view as an editorial point of view or a technological point of view," he told Capital New York in February 2015. "Everything has flowed from an ‘It’s the behavior, stupid,’ approach."

In practice, that has meant mixing and matching "high" and "low" content to cater to the Beast’s Millennial audience, while integrating marketing messages into the user experience.

Noah Shachtman has been the Beast’s executive editor since January 2014. Before becoming a journalist, he worked as a staffer on Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign. He founded DefenseTech.org in 2003, and later sold it to Military.com.

Shachtman ran the ‘Danger Room’ national security blog at Wired magazine, before leaving to work for Foreign Policy as executive news editor. He was a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, and reported from Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, and Russia.

Shachtman frequently appears on TV to explain why the Daily Beast ran a particular story, from reprinting the controversial Charlie Hebdo covers to calling Donald Trump a rapist.

Among the Beast’s frequent contributors are neo-conservatives Jamie Kirchick and David Frum, self-proclaimed ‘Russia expert’ Michael Weiss, and President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations Leslie Gelb.

In February 2010, Jack Shafer of Slate.com accused the Daily Beast’s chief investigative reporter Gerald Posner of plagiarizing content from the Miami Herald. Posner resigned so that the Beast’s reputation "should not be tarnished by any controversy swirling around me."

In January 2014, the Daily Beast published an article by Gordon Chang alleging that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gave out information to Chinese officials during his stay in Hong Kong. Salon.com’s Natasha Lennard called it a "speculation-drenched hack job... entirely devoid of fact."

"At best, Chang’s account reads as fanciful, at worst, part of an ideological smear campaign against the NSA whistleblower," Lennard wrote.

In July 2015, the Daily Beast ran a story by Tim Mak and Brandy Zadrozny accusing Republican presidential contender Donald Trump of marital rape in 1989, quoting remarks by his former spouse Ivana during their divorce proceedings in 1990.

A January 30, 2015, Daily Beast exclusive claimed that Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential candidate, would run again in 2016. After it became clear the scoop was entirely wrong and that Romney was not running, the Beast deleted the article and replaced it with a correction, while keeping the original URL.

@davidfolkenflik @thedailybeast Simple: We had what we thought were strong sources saying Romney was in. They were wrong. But it's on us.

— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) January 30, 2015

In July 2015, the Daily Beast published a piece by Jonathan Alter under the headline, "Ex-Intel Chief: Iran Deal Good for Israel." In the article, Alter cites Ami Ayalon, former head of Israeli security service Shin Bet and ex-chief of the Israeli Navy, whose position he described as: "when it comes to Iran’s nuclear capability, this [deal] is the best option."

According to the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), however, Ayalon spoke out against the deal, and the Daily Beast refused to correct the headline even when contacted about it. CAMERA quoted Ayalon’s statements to the Jerusalem Post, in which he said "I think the deal is bad," and "not good," even if it is "the best plan currently on the table."

In September 2015, an article published under a pseudonym in the Daily Beast attacked the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), alleging connections with an Iranian family that purportedly stood to make a "fortune" from sanctions relief. While acknowledging a personal acquaintance with a member of the Namazi family, NIAC founder and President Trita Parsi described their involvement in NIAC as "nonexistent." Parsi also dismissed the claims by the Daily Beast that an unpublished paper he had written at the age of 24 was somehow "influential."