The Daily Beast

Just what the Web needed, right? Another magazine-style site à la the Huffington Post and Slate. But here’s the twist: This one is edited by Tina Brown, formerly editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and most recently Talk, who seems incapable of producing uninteresting material. As Web mags go, this one is a slick combination of, as David Carr writes in The New York Times, “the trivial and the momentous, the original and the borrowed.” Its “Big Fat Story” seems slim so far, but the items on the “Cheat Sheet” and “Buzz Board” are a lively mix of the serious and the silly (e.g., a British prof’s insistence that the Beatles weren’t really cultural trendsetters), and it attracts some heavy-hitting bloggers (among them Christopher Buckley, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Brown herself). The site is brand-new, only three weeks old, and Brown is tweaking and adjusting it, but unlike most of the other thousands of sites that start up each week, this one has a real chance of going big.