Will Barry Diller, Tina Brown and Sidney Harman quit the foreplay and finally come together?
According to a report in the New York Post, Diller and Harman have renewed discussions about a potential Newsweek-Daily Beast merger — three weeks after the initial talks broke down over editorial control.
A representative for Diller’s IAC said the company would not comment on the report. A rep for Newsweek did not return a request for comment.
But if deal talks have indeed resumed, it would be a surprise to no one. Less than a week after pronouncing the Newsweek-Daily Beast deal dead (Brown said “the engagement was fun but the pre-nup got too complex”) Diller was in New Orleans touting the power of the print medium.
"One way or the other, we'll either buy or create some form of print product,” he said at the Daily Beast’s own Innovator Summit. “As much as digital of course is going to take more and more share, advertisers like to have a print representation of what they're trying to say, if it's tied well and into this very fast moving Internet publication.
"With the Beast, we've got hundreds of thousands of people who are in the exact right spot that anybody would want to reach because they're all, I mean they're a pain in the ass, they're all the influencers, they're all the people who everybody gotta have if they're going to establish a brand."
And even now, more than three months after the 92-year-old Harman agreed to buy the struggling newsweekly for $1 (plus assumption of at least $40 million in liabilities), Newsweek still doesn’t have a permanent editor, making the allure of Brown in a deal with Diller that much more appealing.
Still, as Diller explained in New Orleans, there are a lot of complexities to this partnership.
"We got 50-50 economically, but 50-50 in terms of governance and all of that was not obtainable," Diller said. "'Who, as George Bush said, is 'The Decider'?' [is] a real murky area to navigate."
