![]() ![]() “I am not even sure he will end up selling it unless he can find a secure home. ![]() “Barry has always had a very strong soft spot for the Beast is the truth,” Brown-who ran Vanity Fair and then was the editor in chief of The New Yorker and Talk magazine before launching the Daily Beast-told me in an email. “We’re all at the whims of Barry and what he wants to do.” (IAC declined to comment.) Every media outlet is fucked right now, so we’re hoping just to be stable,” said another. “For the most part I think management is pretty up front about what they know, and what they know is not a lot. “There has been uncertainty and little information shared by management, but reporters haven’t been jumping from the airplane’s exit,” as one put it. Staffers I spoke to said they’ve largely been in the dark about the sale in recent months. Nearly six months later, it’s unclear what the future holds for the Daily Beast, though I’m told that conversations around the sale process are still very active. Speculation about a potential sale was exacerbated when, a month after the Times story, the New York Post reported that Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget had been spotted at IAC’s headquarters, where, according to sources, he met with Daily Beast CEO Heather Dietrick and editor in chief Tracy Connor. In the Times story, Ben Mullin reported that IAC, the holding company founded by Diller which also owns People, Better Homes and Gardens, and Southern Living, had “hired the advisory firm Whisper Advisors to explore the sale of The Daily Beast,” a process that was at that point, in January, “in the early stages” and “may not result in a deal.” Mullin noted that the price the outlet might command was unclear. “I will resist that a lot.” He called the Beast “a good product,” while admitting, “I wish it didn’t cost so much money to operate it.” That I really don’t want to do,” Diller continued. “I hope very much that if we do sell it, we will be selling it into an enterprise that will grow it and not strip it. “We may,” Diller told PBS’ Margaret Hoover-whose husband, John Avlon, once ran the site. Instead, though, we’re offered a fairly weak bash at police procedurals, as Zeke begins to be sent mysterious packages from a Jigsaw copycat killer, and cops start being picked off, one-by-one at the same time, we learn about the history of Zeke and the department’s dodgy past.Back in February, Barry Diller, the billionaire media mogul, was asked about recent reporting in The New York Times that he was considering selling the Daily Beast, the news outlet he founded with Tina Brown in 2008. Nothing wrong with that set-up on the face of it, and in some sense it’s refreshing not to be pummelled with the series’ signature torture porn across the entire running time. Chris Rock - whose love of the franchise initially sparked this film into being - plays Serpico-esque police detective Zeke, alone in a department full of rotten apples, while the killer’s identity plays out like a knotty murder mystery. Kudos must be given for the impulse to switch templates, from straightforward horror to more of a gritty crime thriller. But this is now the second stab at a reboot since the increasingly inaccurately titled Saw: The Final Chapter, and the first that seems to genuinely want to at least try something different. The series, like its killer, seemed better off dead. ![]()
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