Andrew Sullivan, the conservative Atlantic columnist and blogger, has become the latest high-profile writer to jump to Tina Brown’s Newsweek Daily Beast.
He’s among a number of big-name hires Brown has landed since taking the reins of the joint venture last month, combining The Daily Beast, part of Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp., and Newsweek, owned by 92-year-old stereo mogul Sydney Harman.
Brown said there had been informal talks with Sullivan stretching back 10 months, but it was only after the merger with Newsweek that she was able to persuade him to bring his blog, The Dish, and four employees on board.
Starting in April, The Dish will be its own channel within Beast, and Sullivan will also contribute to the print version of the magazine. “We feel it is going to be a perfect fit,” Brown told The Post.
Sullivan and Brown both broke the news on their own Web sites late last night. “For me, it’s a strange mixture of excitement and sadness,” wrote Sullivan, who has been writing The Dish at The Atlantic for four years.
In recent weeks, Brown has hired a slew of notable writers, including Howard Kurtz and Robin Givhan from The Washington Post, Wayne Barrett, the investigative reporter recently booted from the Village Voice, and Peter Boyer from The New Yorker.
The move comes as Brown has been showing around a prototype of a revamped Newsweek that will launch soon. The changes are being phased in even before the official re-launch, although Brown now says that there won’t be one big unveiling.
“It’s been evolving a lot in the last six weeks,” she said. “We’re making changes all the time.” The move to a heavier paper stock on the cover and inside is a key element of a sweeping redesign and should debut in the next week or two.
Several ad media executives said that the magazine was being pitched to them as “Vanity Fair meets The New Yorker.”