Put Your Teeth Back In Tina - Former New Yorker's New Daily Beast Has Bill Clinton But No Bite

October 8, 8:26 AMPop Culture ExaminerDominic Patten

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                          Guess Whose Back? 

Poor Tina Brown.

Once the reinvigorting editor of not just Vanity Fair but also the New Yorker, the journalist has had a rough couple of years. First there was the demise of her much hyped TALK magazine. It launched in 1999 and died a bad selling quick and necassary death in 2002. Then there was her CNBC show Topic (A) With Tina Brown which suffered from low ratings, too many appearences by Christopher Hitchens and proof that just because someone is an excellent dinner party host, as I'm sure Brown is, it doesn't mean they'll be any good on TV, which she wasn't.

And now, after her turgid but best selling book about her pal Diana, the former Princess of Wales, Brown is back with The Daily Beast, her new online publication. What is The Daily Beast? Well, the best one can say is it is The Huffington Post for people who haven't quite mastered the ability to spell "Huffington." By which I mean those who haven't been to the former conservative pundit now liberal pundit's site.

The New York Times had a big write up about the Monday launch of The Daily Beast, which with a dollop of prancing wit is named after the paper in Evleyn Waugh's Scoop. The LA Times and all the usual suspects have lined up to comment, some bringing gifts and some holding knives.

The truth is, besides the address book of Brown's cell phone, there is not a lot there yet. Brown is rather upfront that The Daily Beast launched in BETA form to get itself out there and will just have to grow up in public.

For one thing, it is just so stuck in the 1990s. That's why I said the starting team was the people who Brown has on her cell, because this is not a gang who've got themselves on FaceBook yet. The Daily Beast's idea of the big idea is the intersection between culture and celebrity. A great place to watch the traffic flow by ... in 1993. In 2008, that's just like watching gridlock, and Tina Brown should know, she was one the keen eyes that caught that when it was first all greenlights, but today it's old hat. The Daily Beast's idea of a big get is Bill Clinton recommending books. Great kinda, but let's not fool ourselves - unless you're Barack Obama, Bill Clinton will show up for anything including the opening of an envelope if he knows it has his name inside.I'm just impressed Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop" wasn't playing when I first went on to the site.

Tina Brown may have a fun Q&A about what The Daily Beast is but what it seems to be is all in her opening column. A gender based look at the response to Sarah Palin as the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, Brown overplays the personal endorsement of Palin by the President of the LA chapter of the National Organization of Women, an endorsement the national NOW office has made clear is purely personal and not at all representative of their point of view, and then proceeds to write a bland piece that would have been interesting a month and a bit ago when Palin burst on to the national scene but now seems limp.

That's the problem with The Daily Beast.

The thing about personality driven sites is they have to have more than just personality, which perpetually perky Tina has by the boatload. They have to have a point of view. The Huffington Post has a POV. The Drudge Report has a POV. The Rad Report has a POV. The Daily Beast doesn't seem to have much of a POV except "look at us, we're online, yippy!"

I think Tina Brown was once a great editor, she made The New Yorker sparkle and if sometimes it went NoBrow it was because the culture was going NoBrow and, as a good journalist, she was following the story. The Daily Beast, however, isn't following the story, it's following the trends. And that's no better than an episode of The Hills, if you know what I mean?