NewsBeast isn’t ready to come out of the cage quite yet.
While the Newsweek/Daily Beast merger was expected to be wrapped up by late November or early December, it has been delayed and is not closing until later this month.
Vacationing Newsweek owner Sidney Harman said he expects the deal to be finalized in “mid-January.” There was no word from Barry Diller, chairman of the InterActiveCorp/IAC side of the new joint venture, which owns the Daily Beast.
Most observers blame legal and paperwork delays, combined with the usual holiday slowdown rather than any serious snags that could derail the deal reached in early November.
That means Tina Brown, the Daily Beast editor-in-chief and former editor of The New Yorker and the much-hyped failure Talk Magazine, will have longer to wait before she can put her stamp on the newsweekly when she takes over the combined operations.
In the meantime, interim co-editors Dan Klaidman and Nisid Hajari have agreed to stick around until at least the end of January — and possibly longer.
They have been running the magazine since Jon Meacham left in late August.
With book contracts in hand, Hajari and Klaidman are anxious to turn the page. They both signed with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Klaidman has a deal to write about President Obama’s counterterrorism strategy, while Hajari inked a low six-figure deal for “Midnight’s Furies,” a book about the partition of India.
One insider said the longer it takes for the NewsBeast deal to close, the greater the attrition among demoralized Newsweek staffers, who increasingly regard the deal not so much as a merger of equals but as a takeover.
“Morale at Newsweek? There is no morale because there is no one left,” said one source. “The purge is complete.”