Culture: Tina Brown's Beast unleashed

What do Tina Brown and Freddy Krueger have in common? Just when you think you have seen the last of them, they come roaring back to life. After the debacle of Talk, Tina's glossy magazine that is reported to have lost its investors millions, she launched a new website this week that she describes as "a speedy, smart edit of the web".

Called the Daily Beast, it's a "news aggregator", sifting through the mass of news available on the internet every day and providing links to a tiny fraction of it, with little one-paragraph summaries written by Tina and her staff. For instance, this week it linked to stories on the global financial crisis, John McCain's faltering campaign and the end of human evolution. There is some original content, too, with Kevin Sessums, a veteran celebrity journalist, interviewing Jennifer Lopez.

The model for the Daily Beast is the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington's news aggregator that has been going strong since 2005. Where the Daily Beast differs from the Huffington Post is in not having a political point of view. The Huffington Post is unapologetically liberal, with its army of partisan bloggers putting their left-of-centre slant on the day's news, whereas the Daily Beast is politically neutral.

This creates two problems for the Daily Beast. First, it simply isn't clear what criteria Tina and her editors will employ when deciding what news is of interest to their readers. There is a Q&A on the site, where Tina is asked what filtering mechanism she intends to substitute for a political viewpoint, and her answer is "sensibility, darling". I'm not sure that will be enough.

Second, it means that there is no ready-made market for the Daily Beast. In the case of the Huffington Post, it's a natural roadside stop on the information superhighway for anyone of a liberal persuasion. What will be the Daily Beast's natural constituency? At the moment, it doesn't have one.

Of course, it may overcome these problems and discover a unique personality that appeals to a large number of people. The question is, who is the Lord Copper of the Daily Beast and how long will he keep paying the bills? The answer is Barry Diller, a famously cut-throat media mogul. The clock is ticking, Tina.