Media star Tina Brown announced Wednesday she was leaving the Daily Beast, the online news website she founded five years ago.
Brown, who previously served as editor at the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Tatler, said she was creating a new venture based on her Women of the World Summit she launched in 2010.
Her departure leaves questions about the future of the Daily Beast, which became one of the most prominent news websites, and had operated jointly with Newsweek before selling the remains of the former weekly magazine.
A Daily Beast report said Brown made the announcement to the newsroom on Wednesday.
“Creating the Daily Beast at the original instigation of (media tycoon) Barry Diller in 2008 has given me some of the most exciting and fulfilling years of my professional life,” Brown said in a statement.
“I am enormously proud of what our brilliant editorial team has achieved at the Beast. And I am proud, too, of what we did with Newsweek in the battle we waged to save it from the overwhelming forces of media change.”
The Daily Beast said the website will continue to operate under IAC, the Internet company chaired by Diller and would be overseen by managing director Deidre Depke and executive editor John Avlon.
“The Beast roars on,” Avlon told staffers. “This is a time of great transition and sadness, but Tina’s spirit, which has invigorated the Beast, is going to live on whether she is here in the flesh or not.”
The British-born Brown said she was launching Tina Brown Live Media, a new company “that will merge Brown’s lifelong commitment to journalistic inquiry with her innate ability to dramatically stage storytelling.”
It will be focused on summits, salons and flash debates, “with special emphasis on expanding the annual Women in the World summit she launched in 2010,” her statement said.
Before coming to the United States, Brown hosted a talk show in Britain, ran Tatler and wrote “The Diana Chronicles,” a biography of Princess Diana.
Tina Brown quits Daily Beast, launches new venture
