Barry Diller

Tina Brown and Barry Diller's new Web site, The Daily Beast, has launched. In a Q&A, Ms. Brown explains why her site is different from other news aggregators like The Drudge Report, The Huffington Post, Newser, Brijit, et al.:

The Daily Beast doesn't aggregate. It sifts, sorts, and curates. We're as much about what's not there as what is. And we freshen the stream with a good helping of our own original content from a wonderfully diverse group of contributors.

So, The Daily Beast isn't an aggregator after all. Got it. So, what makes it worth your time?

Per Ms. Brown: "Sensibility, darling.  read more »

The Daily Beast, Tina Brown and Barry Diller's nascent Web venture, was supposed to launch yesterday, as Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici pointed out on his Mixed Media blog.

While Ms. Brown's much-anticipated entry into the news aggregation business continues to be fashionably late, the site does have a new landing page. And that landing page has a logo!  read more »

DENVER--Last night, Denver mayor John Hickenlooper and his wife, New Yorker writer Helen Thorpe, hosted a party in honor of Slate’s just-released ObamaMania book, but there was another more infamous member of the New Yorker family in the room. Tina Brown was wearing an electric blue suit that certainly stood out against the wood molding and green wallpaper of downtown Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore.

She stayed close to the exit, sipping white wine and chatting with her soon-to-be sister in news aggregation, Arianna Huffington. We asked Ms. Brown about the website she has been building with InterActiveCorp’s Barry Diller, but she was, as usual, reluctant to give details.  read more »

According to the Associated Press, Barry Diller's redundantly-named IAC/InteractiveCorp is splitting into five publicly traded companies. Presumably, there will be 10 names between them.

According to AP:

With the split, home shopping network HSN Inc., time-share business Interval Leisure Group Inc., ticketing service Ticketmaster and lending and real estate business Tree.com Inc. are due to begin regular trading Thursday under their own ticker symbols. The symbols are "HSNI" for HSN, "IILG" for Interval, "TKTM" for Ticketmaster and "TREE" for Tree.com.

The company's remaining Internet properties, including search engine Ask.com, are staying under the IAC name and will trade for the next 20 days as "IACID," due to Nasdaq rules.  read more »

It seems like just yesterday—well, late October, anyway—Brijit.com, the website that read and summarized magazines, was launched. At the time, The Washington Post's Frank Ahrens profiled Brijit's founder, Jeremy Brosowsky, and wrote, "[T]he Internet is littered with good ideas that turn out to be bad businesses, and online publishing can be especially tricky: Do you go mass-market or niche? Subscription-based, or free and ad-supported? Original content or aggregation of other content?"

Yesterday, the site ceased publishing new content. In a farewell post on his own site, Brosowsky wrote, "Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we’ve run out of money, and can no longer afford to pursue our vision of adapting great long-form content for a short-form world, at least not as a stand-alone company. As recently as yesterday morning, we thought we had the funding in place to continue our work together. But as it turns out, we don’t."  read more »

Nina Garcia, You. Are. Out. The Project Runway judge reportedly got fired from her post as fashion director at Elle magazine last week. [US Weekly]

Barry Diller who's recently triumphed in court over Liberty Media chairman, John Malone, has a brand new discrimination lawsuit on his hands. [P6]  read more »

Over at Radar, Neel Shah is reporting that Tina Brown is partnering with Barry Diller to develop what Ms. Brown called "a new take on an aggregator website."

Edward Felsenthal, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal, will be the editor. There aren't many other details—Brown didn't give a launch date, or really any specifics—but apparently there will be no "ideological stance."  read more »

The Media Mob just received an invitation to an April 9 launch party for a new InterActive Corp. Web site called RushmoreDrive.com, hosted by IAC CEO Barry Diller and RushmoreDrive CEO Johnny Taylor. But just what is RushmoreDrive? The invite claims that it will be "the web destination that will change the way the Black community Drives the Web." (Drive! Oh, we get it.) Currently, its Web site just says, "Discover More Here Spring 2008," and when The Observer called up Mr. Taylor to find out more, he was tight-lipped.

"Right now we're telling people what it's not," he said by phone from RushmoreDrive's offices in Charlotte, N.C. "I'm telling them it's not a content site. Most of the products you see in the black space are celebrity, sports or entertainment sites, like BET.com or BlackVoices.com. Then you have social networking sites like BlackPlanet.com. We're none of those."  read more »

With the writers’ strike and all, what’s goin’ on with the Oscar parties?  read more »

On far West 18th Street—past the housing projects and the parking lots and the auto-body shops, where the High Line is home not to condos but homeless people—the new, $100 million international headquarters of Barry Diller’s company, InterActiveCorp, rises like an undulating, reflective space station. The lobby is home to the largest video wall in the world, and another video wall, behind the security desk, that shows statistics from various IAC Web sites.  read more »

The American Institute of Architects has announced 2007's Top Ten Green Projects, but none of them are in New York. A local honorable mentioned, however, goes to Coney Island's Stillwell Avenue Terminal Train Shed. [Architectural Record]

Real estate titan Barbara Corcoran, smiley and excited, tells the Today show: "People don't know which way this market is going, it's causing mass confusion!" Does mass confusion lead to chaos and anarchy? Nope. "Confusion, I always believe, begets bargain." [Corcoran, via Curbed]

Gehry's ugly-faced IAC/InterActiveCorp building on the West Side Highway is finally open for business. Why did IAC boss Barry Diller chose Frank Gehry to design his headquarters? He'd heard the architect was "expensive and difficult and ornery." [L.A. Times via Gawker]

Nike, plus the way-cooler LA-based vintage shoe store Fight Club, are each opening their second New York City stores. Expensive tennis sneakers for everyone! [Crain's]