Andrew Sullivan, one of the most prolific and high-profile writers for the Daily Beast, is leaving the IAC/InterActiveCorp-owned news venture and starting his own subscription website.
Sullivan, who arrived from The Atlantic with much fanfare two years ago to write The Dish blog for Daily Beast Editor Tina Brown, said in a blog post that his contract ended on Dec. 31.
He and executive editors Patrick Appel and Chris Bodenner formed their own company, Dish Publishing LLC. On Feb. 1, they will begin charging readers an annual subscription rate of $19.99 for access to the site, andrewsullivan.com.
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Just days after Tina Brown steered Newsweek into an online-only existence, she’s lost one of her biggest draws at the Daily Beast: journalist Andrew Sullivan.
The site will eschew ad dollars because of “how distracting and intrusive it can be, and how it often slows down the page painfully,” Sullivan wrote. “We felt more and more that getting readers to pay a small amount for content was the only truly solid future for online journalism.”
He thanked Brown and IAC/InterActiveCorp Chairman Barry Diller for hosting the Dish site.
“We’re sad to see him go, but we’re excited for him as he goes off to try something new,” said a Daily Beast spokesman.
The move is seen as a blow to Brown, who supervised the last print edition of Newsweek, which was folded into the Daily Beast, and laid off about 60 people on the 270-person staff. She will begin publishing a paid digital-only version starting this Friday for $29.99 a year.
“Her biggest mistake from the beginning was merging Newsweek into the Daily Beast, rather than vice versa,” said Samir Husni, a professor who founded the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi’s Meek School of Journalism. “She was willing to kill a brand that was 80 years old that every household in America knew for one that nobody knows.”
A spokesman for Daily Beast declined to comment.
kkelly@nypost.com
Take that, Tina!
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Take that, Tina!
