The media is an economic freefall and much of it is self-inflicted. There’s an undeniable schadenfreude in watching the self-destruction. Like the Daily Beast getting a former Cosmo editor.
The Daily Beast had another scoop. On her first week on the job as chief creative and content officer, Joanna Coles carried a tip into the newsroom: A friend told her that Barron Trump would attend NYU for college. She told a group of staff to write it up for a new gossip column she wanted, called “Beast Buzz.” After trying to confirm the story, the team came up empty, but Coles pressed them to publish. The task fell to Tracy Connor, the editor-in-chief who eschews her office for a simple desk among reporters and editors. As she wrote up the blind item without a byline, Coles said in a voice loud enough for all to hear: “We will see how it does. Let’s hope it’s true!”
“Let’s hope it’s true!” That’s how the media operates when it comes to any Trump story.
Effective immediately, she would hire a Chief Lauren Sanchez Correspondent and a Chief Fruits and Vegetables Correspondent, based in Montecito, California, to cover Meghan Markle’s American Riviera Orchard, which she was “completely obsessed” with. (The Beast would later publish six stories on Markle’s jam in as many days.)
She did assign two other stories that made editors scramble to kill them for fear of embarrassment. One was to follow up on a rumor that Donald Trump passed gas in his criminal trial. She assigned the politics team to reach out to gastroenterologists about whether the emissions were “stress farts or sleep farts.”
“The big question is, what’s going to happen to the journalism?” said one Daily Beast veteran.
Oh, it’s pretty obvious what happened. The same thing that happened to Salon and Slate, both of which once used to be the sort of publications that the Daily Beast replicated. But eventually an audience consisting of ‘Coles’, that is to say wealthy leftist morons, takes over and remakes it into a bunch of advice columns, woke book reviews and hot takes about media content.
Let’s hope it’s true!