On a sunny morning in early October, Joanna Coles, clad in a stylish tomato-red coat, and Ben Sherwood, dressed more demurely in a corduroy jacket, convened at their regular breakfast spot, the no-frills Star on 18 diner on Manhattan’s Far West Side.
The two veteran media executives were talking about their ambitious plans for The Daily Beast, the 16-year-old money-losing news website, in which they jointly acquired a minority stake in April.
But along with the predictable optimism about the mission they are taking on and enthusiasm about early signs of audience uptick and subscriber growth, Ms. Coles, a former chief content officer of Hearst Magazines, and Mr. Sherwood, a onetime president of ABC News and Disney TV chief, also conveyed a sense of frustration.
Frustration that they weren’t greeted by the staff they inherited as warmly as they expected. Frustration that the site’s tech problems meant they’ve had to buy multiple subscriptions just to log in. Frustration that convincing the newsroom of their editorial vision has been an uphill climb.
Less than three weeks after the pair’s takeover, New York magazine published a detailed report on the friction between reporters and Ms. Coles over story suggestions that they deemed ridiculous, including an investigation into whether former President Donald J. Trump was having stress-induced flatulence during his criminal trial and a list of the most obese members of Congress. (Neither article ran.)
It was clear that many of the sources for the report were inside the organization, with one unnamed staff member bluntly criticizing the new owners’ “warped vision” of the news site.
“This thing came within a day of being sold to the private equity knacker’s yard, where it would have been stripped,” Ms. Coles said later in an interview at The Beast’s offices in Chelsea, using a British term for a junkyard. “In what way is it helpful to tape our conversations and to proudly boast that you are not going to even attempt to look at the stories that your new bosses are asking you to look at?”
“To me, that’s just, like, ‘No wonder the place is going out of business,’” she added.
For his part, Mr. Sherwood was aghast that Beast journalists had anonymously complained about a Daily Beast article on plans by Barron Trump, Mr. Trump’s youngest son, to attend New York University. The article relied on a source of Ms. Coles and was published without a byline.
“That happens to be something that she knew stone cold — her source was solid,” Mr. Sherwood said. “The organization went into a convulsion over this because Joanna did not reveal her source and no one could stand this up with any of their sources.”
But, he asked, “where is Barron Trump at school now?” Indeed, the 18-year-old was spotted on the New York University campus for the start of the school year in September. Mr. Sherwood wrote a Beast article confirming the April scoop.
Giving It ‘One Last Chance’
The Daily Beast, launched in 2008 by the longtime magazine editor Tina Brown and backed by Barry Diller’s IAC, became known over the years as a cheeky and aggressive tabloid with reporting on politics and national security that often had an impact belying the relatively small size of its newsroom. In recent years, it published a series of damaging scoops on the Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker and broke the news of the arrest of the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Named for the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop,” The Daily Beast gave a platform to a new generation of writers, like Taylor Lorenz, Jamelle Bouie and Molly Jong-Fast. When Ms. Brown started the site — after stints editing Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and, less successfully, Talk magazine — she preached a mix of “high-low” stories.
“The Daily Beast at its best was mischievous, subversive and absolutely 100 percent dedicated, often to the point of sociopathy, to breaking big news,” said Noah Shachtman, its editor in chief from 2018 to 2021. “If you look back at this moment in previous election cycles, The Beast played an incredible role.”
But the outlet continuously lost money, and audience traffic has declined over the last two years.
Fed up with the losses, Mr. Diller tried to offload The Daily Beast, at one point considering a deal with the Hollywood publication The Ankler and then looking to sell to a private-equity-backed publisher before landing on the partnership with Mr. Sherwood and Ms. Coles.
“It was imminent: We were selling The Beast,” Mr. Diller said in an interview. But after meeting with Mr. Sherwood and Ms. Coles, he felt their plan made sense.
“I want to give it a last chance,” Mr. Diller said. “It’s very early in the process, but I am more than pleased that we made that decision.”
Mr. Sherwood, 60, and Ms. Coles, 62, were jointly granted a 49 percent equity stake in the business, returning them to the day-to-day scrum of a media company. (None of the parties would disclose the financial details of the deal; IAC still retains majority control.)
The two seem, on the face of it, an odd pairing. She’s a glamorous Briton who conquered the world of glossy magazines and is best known for her star turn as editor in chief of Cosmopolitan from 2012 to 2016. He’s a Harvard-educated Rhodes scholar who made “Good Morning America” the top morning news show while president of ABC News from 2010 to 2014, before being promoted to oversee Disney’s TV group.
They struck up a friendship in 2013 after Mr. Sherwood was impressed by a speech Ms. Coles gave at a New York awards event. By his telling, he went back to his office and immediately wrote her a letter saying he was inspired by her story of coming from Yorkshire, England, to “the pinnacle of publishing in America.”
The pair met for lunch and discovered a mutually voracious love for the news.
“We would try to text each other stories that we thought the other wouldn’t have come across,” Ms. Coles said. “And he really doesn’t miss anything. His breadth of reading is astonishing to me.” He has “a sense of the absurd and the funny, which a lot of people don’t,” she added.
The two talked about doing a journalism project together when Ms. Coles left Hearst in 2018, after she was passed over for the presidency of the magazine division, and Mr. Sherwood left Disney in 2019. But nothing quite came together. In the years that followed, Mr. Sherwood founded and sold Mojo, a youth sports start-up, and Ms. Coles executive-produced the Freeform show “The Bold Type” while heading up a so-called blank-check company and sitting on the boards of Snap and Sonos.
The thought of returning to a newsroom thrilled both Mr. Sherwood and Ms. Coles, especially one that had the benefit of years of brand building under editors like Ms. Brown, John Avlon (now running for Congress), Mr. Shachtman (who went on to lead Rolling Stone) and Tracy Connor, who had come to The Daily Beast from the NBC News investigative unit.
But Ms. Coles and Mr. Sherwood had to immediately confront the fact that the media landscape had changed significantly in their time away from it. In the past few years, BuzzFeed News has shut down, Vice Media filed for bankruptcy and other publishers did mass layoffs. And new competitors kept coming: Puck, Punchbowl, The Free Press, Semafor, the various writers building their singular empires on Substack (including, just recently, Ms. Brown herself).
The Beast was on track to lose $10 million this year, Mr. Sherwood said, and had been losing money and audience for five consecutive quarters before the deal in April.
“The plans that had been set in place were on a path to lose tens and tens of millions of dollars, and that path was no longer viable and IAC was no longer going to do that,” Mr. Sherwood said.
That was the message he and Ms. Coles delivered when they met with the staff of The Daily Beast for the first time on April 15. They thought the newsroom would be relieved that it was now in the hands of experienced media executives with serious bona fides who were committed to revitalizing it.
The Beast staff saw it differently. According to interviews with nearly a dozen former and current members, some of whom shared notes taken at the first meetings with their new bosses, and all of whom asked to remain anonymous out of fear of jeopardizing their career prospects, Mr. Sherwood and Ms. Coles came across as aggressive and relentlessly negative about the state of The Beast and the work that its staff was doing.
Ms. Coles, who serves as the chief creative and content officer and runs the editorial side of the operation, told the staff that she and Mr. Sherwood wanted more “funny” and would “flood the zone” with content, the staff members said. Mr. Sherwood, who is the publisher and chief executive, became visibly angry when discussing his personal grievance: the technology issues that bedeviled the site’s paywall and payment system.
In the weeks that followed, Ms. Coles began issuing story ideas that many in the newsroom chafed at and suggested hiring a “Lauren Sánchez correspondent” to report on the fiancée of the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Reporters started leaving, including the Washington bureau chief, Matt Fuller, and some of his political reporters. (Mr. Fuller’s replacement, Martin Pengelly, a journalist from The Guardian, lasted five weeks in the job.) In early June, The Beast’s editor in chief since 2021, Ms. Connor, was replaced with Hugh Dougherty, an editor from The New York Post and, like Ms. Coles, a veteran of the British press. Mr. Sherwood and Ms. Coles announced a voluntary buyout program with an aim of cutting costs by $1.5 million. By the beginning of July, The Beast’s head count was down about 35 percent through the buyouts and a handful of layoffs.
The Extremes of Wealth and Power
Ms. Coles has a specific vision for what The Beast can do: shorter and sharper articles that focus on people, power, politics and pop culture, with a dose of satire to lighten the mood during a perilous time. She says she is fascinated by the extremes of wealth and power and behavior, and pointed to articles about A-list celebrities who gave Sean Combs cover and the troubles of Will Lewis, the chief executive of The Washington Post, as recent highlights.
“I wanted something that curated a lot of news out there that wasn’t about the end of democracy all the time,” she said.
Ms. Coles said she felt that The Beast had “some very good editors” over the years, but that its place in the media landscape had been diminished.
“I certainly wasn’t reading it on a regular basis,” she said. “Another editor said to me when we came here, he said: ‘It’s the boring avatar of the resistance.’ I thought he summed it up in one.”
She is trying to spark ideas and reinvigorate the newsroom’s culture, which she said had been affected when the pandemic caused more people to work remotely. Beast employees are now required to work in the office four days a week.
“We have some really good people here who were here all along who are excited by the mission and re-energized,” Ms. Coles said.
There are others she was not as fond of. Ms. Coles recounted that a political reporter did not call in to the newsroom on the Sunday that President Biden announced he would drop out of the presidential race. Ms. Coles was at her house in the Hamptons that day, hosting her friend Emma Tucker, the editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal and a fellow Briton, and the pair “turned my dining room table into an ad hoc newsroom.”
“I was incredulous that a political reporter would not call in because it was the weekend,” she said. “To me it was madness that we would have political correspondents who didn’t want to cover that story immediately.”
That political reporter, Jake Lahut, who has since left, referred The New York Times to the three articles he filed the day that Mr. Biden dropped out.
“The most important lesson I’ve learned from this is how not to run a newsroom,” Mr. Lahut said.
There has been “a Niagara of news,” as Ms. Coles described it, in the lead-up to November’s election, but The Beast’s newsroom is now less than half the size it was six months ago. And days away from the presidential election, the Washington bureau is staffed with just two people.
“They saved us, to what end?” one reporter who has left The Beast asked. “What is The Daily Beast now, and is it better?”
The lack of staffing during an intense news period has turned the newsroom into a churn factory, according to people with knowledge of the work environment, with pressure on employees to pump out articles to generate as much reader traffic as possible. The newsroom has been asked to publish at least 40 posts a day, which is what it was producing before the staffing cuts. According to a presentation given to the newsroom in September, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, The Daily Beast published more than 210 articles in three days around the presidential debate in September.
Many of the articles on the website are now aggregated from content published elsewhere or written by freelance contributors, though there is still some original reporting. Mr. Sherwood and Ms. Coles have also contributed to the site, with Mr. Sherwood appearing to relish a return to his reporting days of decades ago: He has already written more than 50 articles, including updates on the Menendez brothers’ case (which Mr. Sherwood notes he has followed since 1989) and a post on the 100th birthday of the Caesar salad.
The Coles-and-Sherwood Daily Beast has had its outside detractors. Ms. Jong-Fast, the MSNBC pundit and former Beast editor-at-large, said in an interview: “At a time when we need brave voices and serious journalism more than ever, it’s devastating to watch it devolve into tacky clickbait.” The NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny, another former Beast writer, posted a similar view on Instagram Threads in September: “It’s weird watching someone buy something you love, take that thing that was once good, and just slowly murder it in public. Anyway RIP The Daily Beast.”
Despite criticism of The Beast’s editorial approach, Mr. Sherwood credited the heightened news cycle over the last few months with helping the site record four months of subscriber growth. Data from the measurement firm Comscore showed a recent bump in visitors to The Beast’s site, with 21.3 million in September, up from a monthly average of 13.8 million in 2023.
“They have had a profitable month or two, which historically has not happened at The Beast,” Mr. Diller said. “That is quite significant.”
Mr. Sherwood said they were stabilizing the business by getting the staff to the right size, fixing the technology powering the website and migrating to a new content management system. (The company recently added a president and chief operating officer, the tech entrepreneur Keith Bonnici.) Mr. Sherwood said they would focus on growth in their second year, such as exploring new revenue streams.
“We are totally aware of how hard and adverse the conditions are,” Mr. Sherwood said, but “we’re more optimistic in the path than ever with independent, feisty, intelligent tabloid journalism.”
Ms. Coles has focused on building buzz for the new Daily Beast. She regularly appears on cable television shows, and recently suggested without evidence on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Mr. Trump was “microdosing drugs,” a claim the host Jonathan Lemire had to quickly clear up. She has tapped her extensive Rolodex to sign up Samantha Bee, the television host and comedian, to co-host a podcast with her. Guests so far have included the “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver and the Democratic strategist James Carville.
The Beast also was quick to jump on the non-endorsement scandals engulfing The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, posting a link to subscribe on X with the message: “The Daily Beast reports without fear or favor. Apparently, that’s something not all newsrooms can do.”
Ms. Brown, the founder, said she had advised Ms. Coles on “reviving the talent” and getting a mix of seasoned reporters and young writers.
“The Daily Beast is really an upscale tabloid with attitude,” Ms. Brown said. “I think it definitely needed a face-lift.”
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