(A spokesperson for The Daily Beast said neither story was assigned.)
Over the course of its 16-year existence, the Beast earned a reputation for its scrappy reporting.
The site balanced tabloidy, lowbrow scoops Gov.
(Walker denied this.)
None of this meant the Beast made any money.
For Coles, that meant making the Beast more fun.
“I thought he summed it up in one,” she said.
All of it played out in gossip columns and on media Twitter.
It was the punch in of juicy workplace implosion that would have made for a great Daily Beast story.
To some extent, the plan has worked.
“We’re staying rigorously focused,” Coles told Business Insider in January.
“Everything has to go through a filter of: Is this about power?
Is it about people?
Is it about politics?
If it’s not about that, we’re not interested.”
The event series was a “seven-figure deal,” Bonnici told staffers.
“Very excited about that.
Clearly I like money, if you haven’t figured that out.”
“That skill set is completely inapplicable to what they’re trying to do.
Its goal, as Brown wrote years later, was to combine “tabloid raciness with sophisticated wit.”
The site itself reeked of urgency, with splashy headlines in dramatic black and red.
Though it never made a profit, the Beast became known for punching above its weight.
But the staff was skeptical from the start.
“There was no honeymoon period,” one former staffer said.
Sherwood said his and Coles' critique “was never personal.”
Traffic had plummeted double digits.
The tech and website were broken,” Sherwood said.
He and Coles, he added, were trying to figure out how to turn things around.
At times, things got tense between them and their inherited staffers.
“You are working in much, much nicer conditions.”
Coles repeatedly questioned whether Lahut had what it took to be a journalist.
A few days later, Lahut resigned.
Baragona told BI in August.
“That’s not what we’re looking to do.”
In the middle of the first all-hands meeting, she was interrupted by her cellphone ringing.
“Oh, it’s Kara Swisher,” Coles said, referring to the podcast host.
“I’ll call her back.”
There were two other people there, she said: Lorne Michaels and Steven Spielberg.
Coles, it turned out, wanted a journalist to investigate Gov.
Kristi Noem’s budget for hair, makeup, and manicures.
“That’s just Joanna,” one former staffer said.
“She didn’t mean to demean what we do.
That’s her tabloid Daily Mail sensibility.”
“But the first thing Joanna does is a Lauren Sanchez correspondent.
You couldn’t have shown less of an understanding of what The Daily Beast was than that.”
“He’s an absolute savant when it comes to news,” Coles told BI.
“And he’s got a sort of Scottish rigor.
He’s in the office at 8, and he rarely leaves before 8.”
Dougherty seemed like an awkward fit for the newsroom’s culture.
In July, Dougherty was chatting with writers in a weekend Slack channel.
Staffers felt like they were increasingly being asked to cross ethical lines.
He said he never volunteered himself to be quoted anonymously.
On occasion, Coles herself could be loose with the facts.
They added that Jong-Fast warned Coles about being so egregiously wrong on TV.
Some reporters worried that Coles' bravado would hurt their credibility not to mention their relationships with key sources.
The story didn’t run.
Coles said that many of her story ideas were attempts to start conversations among staffers.
“I come from a background where people argue about ideas,” she said.
These days, that has all but disappeared.
While there was substantial interest from private equity, Diller preferred not to see the outlet stripped for parts.
He wanted to give the site a fighting chance, said someone privy to conversations about its future.
For Diller, that meant “having a star at the helm,” the person said.
(Diller declined to comment.)
Coles and Sherwood seemed to have everything Diller was looking for.
They’d had long careers and were well-known names in their respective fields.
The Beast was a chance for them to get back into the newsmaking game.
Coles left Hearst in 2018 after Troy Young was appointed president.
They saw each other as kindred spirits, the latter of Sherwood’s former colleagues said.
Coles and Sherwood spoke Diller’s language and existed within the billionaire’s rarefied social orbit.
And Diller had started his career at ABC, where Sherwood came up.
It wasn’t long before the leaks began.
“This is not Jimmy Finkelstein,” he said.
He and Coles weren’t “trying to make you guys write 70 articles a day.”
Around the same time, Coles and Sherwood began gearing up for layoffs.
Instead, the union proposed presenting the staff with voluntary buyouts.
As things in the office grew tenser, more people decided to leave.
Three employees eventually rescinded their requests.
In the end, 22 members took a buyout, resulting in $1.9 million total in cuts.
Management also laid off eight nonunion employees.
When the restructuring was through, the Beast was down to 13 unionized staffers.
Even as Coles and Sherwood downsized, they were eager to attract new talent.
Pengelly expected to take charge of a competent, well-oiled newsroom, someone with knowledge of the situation said.
Instead, he found himself short-staffed.
But he was still under pressure from Sherwood and Coles to churn out stories.
After five weeks at the Beast, he quit without another job lined up.
(Coles declined to comment on this specific assignment.
Multiple people said Coles and Sherwood struggled to make hires.
One politics reporter they attempted to hire, Cameron Joseph, went to The Christian Science Monitor instead.
In fact, just that morning, a woman had recognized her during a coffee meeting.
“I know you; you’re Joanna Coles,” she recalled the woman saying.
“I would love to write for you.”
Traffic is up, too.
Staffers have continued to leave.
The investigative reporter Kate Briquelet departed in January.
Coles and Sherwood are exploring new ways to make money.
The Daily Beast spokesperson said this partnership has yet to materialize.
Sherwood sometimes contributes to this count himself.
(Sherwood said he used a senior executive source to land the McDonald’s scoop.)
For IAC and Diller, making money is certainly good.
So we’ll see."
The person questioned whether Diller is achieving that with this iteration of the Beast.
For now, though, Sherwood and Coles are getting another shot at media relevance.
So far, they’ve presented a united front.
But “I think Ben is more worried than Joanna” about reputational damage, a reporter said.
“Joanna is more like: ‘Fine, you don’t want to ride with us?
I don’t need you.'”
