Business

NewsBeast adds key staff, sets April launch

Tina Brown plans to turn to two former Time magazine veterans to run Newsweek on an interim basis while she puts the finishing touches on a sweeping redesign that is not expected to be unveiled until April.

Steve Koepp, a former No. 2 editor at Time magazine, and Arthur Hochstein, longtime art director of Time, will both join the staff of the Newsweek Daily Beast Co. today, according to people close to the situation.

The caretaker editors will hold down the fort while Brown — the one-time editor of the New Yorker and the much-hyped Talk magazine failure — soups up the spring NewsBeast with permanent Art Director Dirk Barnett, a Maxim veteran who briefly worked at Lucky magazine.

Koepp will overlap with current interim editors Dan Klaidman and Nisid Hajari. They agreed to stay on for a month when the deal to merge Newsweek with the Daily Beast, owned by media mogul Barry Diller’s IAC/Interactive Corp., took longer than expected.

Koepp spent 25 years at Time, rising to deputy editor during the era of former Managing Editor Jim Kelly, before moving to Fortune as executive editor from 2007 to 2009.

For the past year, he has been running a long-term project called Assignment Detroit, in which Time Inc. purchased a home in the Motor City, staffing it with writers and editors who cranked out stories for titles including Time, Fortune, Money, People and Essence.

In 1994, he and his film-producing brother Dan co-wrote the screenplay for “The Paper,” starring Michael Keaton, Glenn Close and Marisa Tomei.

Hochstein left Time Inc. for a similar interim creative director role at BusinessWeek after McGraw-Hill sold it to Bloomberg LP two years ago. He designed more than 1,000 covers during his 15-year run as the art director and was heavily involved in its last major redesign two years ago. kkelly@nypost.com