Newsweek and Daily Beast to Merge

Newsweek magazine and IAC-owned The Daily Beast have announced plans to merge their operations, hoping to exploit each others’ respective strengths in journalism and digital.

The new entity – dubbed The Newsweek Daily Beast Company – will be equally owned by IAC and Sidney Harman, who acquired Newsweek magazine from the Washington Post Co. earlier this year. In a prepared statement, Harman said the merger will “provide the ideal combination of established journalism authority and bright, bristling website savvy.”

Tina Brown – a founding partner and Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Beast – will extend her role to accommodate Newsweek magazine, too, while The Daily Beast President Stephen Colvin will serve as CEO of the new company.

“Consumers and advertisers value media distributed across multiple platforms… The merger of The Daily Beast and Newsweek audiences creates a powerful global media property for the digital age,” Colvin commented. Brown, meanwhile, said she hoped the “metabolism” of The Daily Beast will help “power the resurgence” of Newsweek.

The Daily Beast currently reaches an audience of nearly 5 million unique visitors a month, the company said. Newsweek, meanwhile, publishes three English-language editions overseas, and six weekly local-language editions.