The company was owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp and the estate of Sidney Harman, with Stephen Colvin of The Daily Beast as CEO.
The Daily Beast was founded in 2008 by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker as well as the short-lived Talk Magazine.
As former Newsweek president Mark Edmiston comments on The New York Times, "I don’t see how you can take two money-losing businesses and put them together and come up with a single entity that makes money.
The news came unexpectedly to staffers, a sentiment reflected on SaveNewsweek.com, which states that "It’s always nice to wake up and find out in the Times that your job is doomed".
[8] On February 1, 2013, Brian Ries, the social media editor for NewsBeast, announced that the company had changed its name.