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preferences
Barry Diller Will Cater to Very Specific Sexual Tastes
After pawning off his highbrow cultural shopping newsletter on the New York Observer, what does Barry Diller buy? Sites for people with fetishes for the "Big and Beautiful," Black Baby Boomers and Italians. Diller, after all, knows from picky. (Pic) -
jared kushner
Typo, Filler Ad, Mainstream Movie Herald New York Observer's Second Very Short List
How is shopping newsletter Very Short List doing on the second day under the New York Observer's ownership? Poorly enough to motivate mogul wannabe Jared Kushner to hire some dedicated staff, perhaps. More » -
Popular Gay Books
Amazon.com Outs Barry Diller
Ho ho, what do people who buy a copy of "Dillerland," a biography of married media mogul Barry Diller, also buy, according to the Amazon.com robots? More » -
deals
'The Observer's Very Short List' Proudly Brought to You by the New York Observer
The first edition of email newsletter Very Short List is out for the first time under the control of New York Observer publisher Jared Kushner. What advertiser do you think he lined up? More » -
breaking
'Very Short List's Been Sold To Jared Kushner, We're All Fired.'
A source writes in: ink on the long-rumored deal selling IAC property Very Short List to Jared Kushner and The New York Observer's dry. VSLers have been fired, and the property's clumsily fallen into the Observer's hands, now. Update: confirmed.
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moguls
The Very Long Con of a Very Short List
Barry Diller's effort to pawn off Very Short List, his failed shopping newsletter for the rich, is turning into a classic New York media folly — a big drama over a puny digital property. More » -
mogul toys
Barry Diller's Not-So-Exclusive 'Very Short List'
Very Short List has been a favorite bauble of Barry Diller since the IAC chief established it nearly three years ago, after failing to buy Daily Candy. He envisioned VSL as a smart, tidy newsletter. But it looks worrisomely distended. More » -
eating disorders
Barry Diller: Picky Eater
Heterosexual business magnate Barry Diller was a guest on CNBC's Power Lunch today, which was shot on location at the Four Seasons. And he freaked out when they tried to make him eat. More » -
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jazz feet
Old Man Twinkle Toes Delights Room Full of Children
Barry Diller was on hand to introduce the The CollegeHumor Show (his IAC owns a stake in the mostly-online venture) at last night's launch party. He made old man jokes and did some fancy footwork. More » -
gallery
The CollegeHumor Show's Premiere Party
Those fratty nerds at CollegeHumor celebrated the launch of their new MTV television show last night, in the lobby of their big boss Barry Diller's IAC building in Chelsea. Here are some photos. More » -
23/6
Barry Diller's Funny Business
Just last month, IAC chief Barry Diller was chiding his fellow moguls for laying workers off in a recession and spending indiscriminately. So how does he explain getting rid of 23/6, his humor site? More » -
media
Tina Brown's 'Reinvention' Is Wearing Thin
Tina Brown — who once edited Tatler, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker and Talk — has reinvented herself by editing a website that mixes high and low culture. Where have we heard that before? -
barry diller
Barry Diller: The Recession's Daddy Warbucks
IAC boss Barry Diller could not give a fluff about this "recession" you speak of! While pessimists like our own boss here are laying people off in anticipation of economic doom for media companies in the coming year, Diller is prescribing just the opposite strategy. Yesterday he slammed profitable companies for making layoffs and throwing workers out into an unforgiving environment, and said now is a great time to buy companies. He also railed against "indiscriminate spending." So does Diller measure up to his own expectations? Ehhh... More » -
barry diller
Barry Diller's 'Wife' Invites Him Home
It sounds like a fun night for Barry Diller: Closeted magazine Details put on a party for Milk, a movie about the first openly gay man elected to office in California, and the InterActive Corp. chairman was in attendance. Designer Marc Jacobs was there with his boyfriend, as was Gossip Girl's Chace Crawford, chatting, for some reason with Taylor Momsen. Topping off the evening quite nicely, fashion executive Diane von Fursternberg "invited Diller... back to her place," according to Page Six, along with designer Valentino Garavani and actress Marisa Berenson. For dinner, of course. Which was awfully generous, considering that von Furstenberg is Diller's wife. Officially, at least. As Diller knows well, mergers take quite some time to integrate, and some components just never mesh at all. -
trade roundup
'Hellraiser' Summoned For Remake
· The End of Ideas: It's Time to Redo Hellraiser Edition. French horror director Pascal Laugier is in final negotiations to direct a "re-imagining of Hellraiser" for Dimension. Laugier reassured Cliver Barker fans that he "would never betray what [Barker] has done," and to look forward to a mostly faithful adaptation starring a new icon of horror, Velcroface. [THR] More » -
tina brown
Tina Brown Says Arianna Will Publish Anything
Internet publishers Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown may both be foreign transplants to the U.S., but there's little question which of the two fifty-somethings has more fully assimilated her site to the democratic rough-and-tumble of American Web culture. It was Huffington who offered blogs to five virtual strangers over the course of two days, as documented in the New Yorker earlier this month, including "the Asperger’s-afflicted teen-age son of a radio d.j." and "a woman, dressed exclusively in green, who was trying to stop insecticide spraying." Brown, in contrast, has lent her Daily Beast a distinctly royalist feel, as one might expect from a Commander of the British Empire. And the former New Yorker editor played the snob angle for all it was worth in a lengthy interview with Portfolio's Lloyd Grove: More » -
layoffs
Ticketmaster lays off an estimated 1,000 employees
The layoffs are moving up the food chain, from the startups to the larger tech beasts. FuckedStartups writes that Ticketmaster is laying off 35 percent of its 3,000-plus staff, which squares with other reports I've heard. Ticketmaster is besieged with competition from concert promoter LiveNation, and was recently spun off by IAC. If I had to bet, I'd say these cuts have as much to do with removing the layers of cruft which accumulated under years of flitty mismanagement by IAC CEO Barry Diller as they do with the economy. -
books
Diane Von Furstenberg's Crazed Fashion-Comic
Diane von Furstenberg is a noted fashion designer, responsible for creating the looks-good-on-every-woman wrap dress. She is also married to IAC's Barry Diller—who is, for his part, a noted homosexual! DVF has created a comic book for DC Comics called The Adventures of Diva, Viva, and Fifa, in which "we find Diane herself (a little younger than she is today), who brings us inside the unique world of Diva, Viva and Fifa..." Check out the comixx after the jump! More » -
tina brown
Tina Brown Orgasmic Over Getting Buckley Fired
Though she's a newcomer to the internet, Tina Brown has spent a lifetime honing her ability to self-promote. Which is how the former Vanity Fair editor seemed to have instinctively grasped what was expected of her last night on the Colbert Report: sell the sizzle, not the steak when it comes to her new internet venture, the Daily Beast — and remember that no points are deducted for going a bit over the top, per the self-parodying bloviations of host Stephen Colbert. When it came time to discuss the Beast's central role in getting Christopher Buckley fired from National Review, Brown couldn't just say the incident was exciting — no, she had to claim it turned the whole office into a party! Lest anyone think she was joking, Brown again mentioned how much the firing thrilled her a few breaths later. Brown, who has herself done away with plenty of magazine writers, may be learning the nuts and bolts of the Web on the job, but her gleeful, shameless bloodlust may yet reveal her as a natural for the medium. For proof, click the video icon to watch the attached clip. -
tina brown
Beast To Devour $18m
Is The Daily Beast Tina Brown's clever homage to Evelyn Waugh's fictional newspaper or an inadvertent description of the new website's voracious financial appetite? The web property needs $18m from Barry Diller's IAC to fund its next three years, according to Simon Dumenco. -
Blamestorming
Barry Diller blames investors for IAC stock price
Buried in a Wall Street Journal interview with Barry Diller, CEO of the ever-shifting Internet conglomerate IAC, which owns Ask.com and some other websites, was a nugget of insight revealing what Diller thinks of the people who invest in his company. Asked about IAC's stock performance, he replied:The truth is the market made judgments, and the recent judgments have been poor. There were legitimate reasons for that. Now, there are operating facts about this company that are irrefutable: It has revenue, it has earnings, it has a lot of cash and no debt. More » -
search
Is Ask.com feeling lucky?
Ask.com's latest revamp, unveiled by CEO Jim Safka to the New York Times, attempts to dive deeper into the Web, pulling "structured data," a fashionable buzzword, from sources like TV listings and health databases. Give Barry Diller's scrappy search engine, owned by his IAC conglomerate, this much: When at first it doesn't succeed, it tries, tries, tries again. But you can't blame the market, or users, for finding all this trying, well, trying. More » -
tina brown
Tina Brown Launches Daily Beast
Tina Brown unveiled this morning her new internet venture, the Daily Beast. The Post's Keith Kelly said the website, a revival of the fictional paper in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, is in the "soft launch phase," meaning apparently that it's devoid of advertisers, and that it "sees itself as a must-read for hipsters in news, politics and pop culture." Ahem. From our quick look — it temporarily went password protected as we were reading — the site seemed more noteworthy for its slavish devotion to internet publishing memes than for any particular innovation. Some traffic-baiting Apple coverage? Yes, there's a column by former Think Secret publisher Nicholas Ciarelli. Celebrity contributors? Sure, if you count the likes of Bill Clinton, who mails in book recommendations, and Project Runway alumna Laura Bennett, who posted a column. There's counterintuitive, Slate-like material such as "Why I Call My Wall Street Patients Pussies," by an ostensibly caring psychiatrist. And, as if to prove she is now truly blogger, Brown concludes her debut column with the one-word sentence, "Heh." Soon she'll emailing Digg requests to her old publishing friends and trying to get to 10,000 friends on Facebook, and we'll all find it hard to imagine she ever edited the New Yorker. -
Listicle
The Many (Rumored) Loves of Anderson Cooper
Dreamy Silver Fox Anderson Cooper may have a new boyfriend. Village Voice gossip Michael Musto is doing some whispering about a strapping young lad named Jonathan Chase who may or may not be canoodling with the esteemed CNN anchor. Cute! We care not because we're pointing fingers at a gay person, but because it's as newsworthy (or, at least, gossipworthy) as who Kate Hudson or Leonardo DiCaprio is dating. We're, um, orientation blind. After the jump, we've provided a small listicle (because why the hell not) detailing some of the Coop's previous romantic dalliances.
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iac
Barry Diller shows the children his Zwinky Cuties
At an oh-so-pink party in Times Square yesterday — one stuffed with enough cupcakes to Google's Marissa Mayer proud — IAC launched a virtual world for girls aged 6 to 12, calling it Zwinky Cuties. Barry Diller presided and I captured the bizarre affair in video. More » -
media
Rupert Murdoch's Genetic Destiny Revealed
Sure, you knew Anderson Cooper was the adorable unicorn of TV news anchors, but did you know he is so incredibly magical he can roll his tongue into a "really complicated four-leaf clover?" He can! Tongue-rolling is a genetic trait, but one can't help wonder if Cooper has had some practice. He apparently shows his skills only to certain, uh, special friends, like fellow closeted media personality Barry Diller, who, no joke, compared tongue technique with Cooper at a special retreat in Idaho. Some Google people were there, and the next thing you know, the tonguing had resulted in a big genetic-testing soiree in New York! Here's what Ivanka Trump and Rupert Murdoch said about their DNA at the party:
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tina brown
Tina Brown Stumbles Early In Comeback Attempt
Tina Brown's image as a media power player remains anchored in the 1980s and the 1990s, when she edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. She's attempting to change that with an internet venture, the Daily Beast, funded by InterActive Corp. chairman Barry Diller. But an early blunder getting Beast off the ground has left Brown red-faced and more shackled to her past than ever. It seems Brown's big idea for launching her website was — stop us if you've heard this one before — to publish a big list of the most powerful people in Hollywood. "The idea is so 1980s," one source told Nikki Finke. Apparently no one is even bothering to call Brown's staff back as they attempt to report the feature: More » -
caption contest
You know little boy, I have much I can teach you
At the Diane von Fürstenberg show at New York's Fashion Week, Google cofounder Sergey Brin and his 23andMe cofounder wife Anne Wojcicki were spotted front and center. Which is hilarious, since Brin is rarely seen in anything but a t-shirt and jeans — hopefully he wore more stylish footwear than Crocs. Here he's spotted in the usual ensemble with Barry Diller, CEO of IAC, who had the sense to wear actual fashion. Friday's winner was hmann with "No, it's $40 for one song. You have to buy your own drinks, and there's no touching." (Photo by Getty/Michael Tran) -
copyfight
Is Opentape a jab at the RIAA?
Following the shutdown of Muxtape, a site for posting online mixtapes, in a dispute with the music industry, someone has launched Opentape.fm, where you can download code to easily create your own Muxtape-like online mixtapes of MP3 files. And if the creators of Muxtape aren't directly responsible, they probably fed Opentape's developers everything they would need. The first clue is that the site is powered by the favored online publishing platform of millennial hipsters, Tumblr. Another clue is that the domain registration information points to 152 W. 57th Street in Manhattan, which just happens to be IAC CEO Barry Diller's address (Justin Ouellette, Muxtape's founder, worked at IAC site Vimeo). Then there are two small hints in the code: More » -
dan rather
Is Dan Rather Joining Tina Brown's New Venture?
Dan Rather's contract with Mark Cuban's TV network HDNet should not be up until nearly a year from now, assuming the terms Rather disclosed just before he inked the deal still hold. But would the contract prevent the former CBS Evening News anchor from contributing in some way to Tina Brown's forthcoming news website The Beast? Perhaps that's what Brown and Rather were discussing during a "very long lunch" at The Park on Tenth Avenue, as reported by a Post spy. Though Rather's work at HDNet has garnered some positive recognition, it's not nearly as visible as his work for CBS was. A Web gig or partnership would give Rather a shot at regaining more of the attention he once had — and that any veteran TV newsman would crave. Perhaps the skilled lawyers working for Brown's business partner Barry Diller can work something out on the proud old newshound's behalf. [Post] -
huffington clones
Every Print Diva Must Have A Website
You know how you are always saying to yourself "What the world needs now is a website… that would devote itself to chronicling the entertainment industry"? Well, another half million venture capital dollars has found a home trying to do that under the great helmsladyship of ex-New York Times Hollywood reporter Sharon Waxman. So now it's a trend, this "internet as representing some sort of future for the media" thing! Because Tina Brown told us last week her plans for internet moguldum involve a new website called the Daily Beast, and Bonnie Fuller confirmed she was starting her own new website a few weeks before that, and while Waxman is not, like the two other media divas, internet retarded — she has a blog! — she is a lady, and as with the other two we hope her venture, The Wrap LLC fails because we're sick of having new sites we're supposed to check on the internet. More » -
revivals
Tina Brown To Release The Beast
Tina Brown has worked in the US for more than two decades, since taking the helm of Vanity Fair in 1984; and she's now attempting to reinvent herself for the internet. But Lady Evans, as the 55-year-old former magazine editor is also entitled to call herself, remains at heart a Brit of an earlier generation, pickled in ink and arch wit. Her forthcoming news site, backed by old patron Barry Diller of IAC, is to be dubbed The Daily Beast, after the shameless tabloid of Evelyn Waugh's 1938 novel Scoop. The Digg kiddies will be so confused.
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earnings
IAC down more than half a billion in second quarter
In the second quarter, IAC swung from a $94.6 million profit last year to a $421.6 million loss this year. Don't blame Jakob Lodwick! His former company, Vimeo, is nowhere near the top of IAC/InterActiveCorp's expense report for the past quarter. The real problem at Barry Diller's Internet empire is Cornerstone Brands, a rollup of catalog companies undermined by weak consumer spending in home and apparel retail. Cornerstone's losses led to a $300 million writedown in goodwill in IAC's second quarter. In addition, the soft real estate market cut revenue for home financing site LendingTree nearly in half. More » -
college humor
MTV Buys College Humor Show
MTV has bought the pilot for a TV show from the gentlemen behind CollegeHumor.com. The deal is for six episodes, scheduled to air this fall, we hear. No word yet on exactly what the content will be, how much MTV paid, or what role supermogul and College Humor owner Barry Diller may have played in making the deal happen. But needless to say, it will add a much-needed dose of humorous frat-boy hijinks to MTV's current schedule of sober public affairs programming. [UPDATE: We hear the show will consist of comedy shorts, wrapped in a storyline, set in the CH office]. (Pictured: CH co-founder Ricky Van Veen) -
max levchin
Barry Diller reveals he still likes them young in Sun Valley
At Allen & Co.'s annual schmoozefest in Sun Valley, Idaho, there were a lot of regulars, like IAC's Barry Diller — and a few new faces, like Slide CEO Max Levchin. Julia Boorstin of CNBC reports that the two were "lingering" together at lunch. This after Kevin Rose reported how Diller charmed More » -
the chart
Vimeo without founder Jakob Lodwick: quite successful
Is IAC's Vimeo, the video-sharing site founded by bizarrely charismatic (and just plain bizarre) New York entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick, missing its founder? In a word, no. Lodwick lost his job due to insubordination last November; his dare-you-to-sue-me funding of an IAC employee's music startup, in an apparent violation of his noncompete agreement, is right in line with the nose-thumbing he did while on the job. We heard IAC finally fired Lodwick because he would blow off meetings with upper management when it wanted to talk to him about things like marketing and growth. So who got it right — IAC chairman Barry Diller's suits, or the wannabe iconoclast? More » -
media
A Guide To The Media Methuselahs
"I don't want to die. I love what I'm doing," said Viacom chief Sumner Redstone on CNBC yesterday. My, what a positive and also extremely sad quote! Coming from an old, old man like Redstone, it's more of a last-ditch prayer to Father Time than a peppy statement of on-the-job satisfaction. After the jump, a complete guide to the top five elderly figures in media moguldom. They're a cast that could end up having spent decades in power—probably because the younger counterparts who should be overtaking them decided to go into the tech industry on the West Coast instead (except Nick Denton). May these old men all live, um, a lot longer: More » -
photo album
When They Were Young
Bob Colacello's party photographs from the 1970s—when the reporter edited Andy Warhol's Interview magazine and chronicled New York's social scene—are strangely poignant. To think that immortal Chelsea boy Calvin Klein (top) was once so debonair! Grizzled mogul Barry Diller (pictured with Diane von Furstenberg then and now) had such a seductively wicked smile. It's hard to imagine Vogue's André Leon Talley (pictured next to Studio 54's Steve Rubell and Warhol) as anything other than the imposing African cardinal he plays on the red carpet. And then one remembers that today's socialites will one day appear equally ludicrous to the generation that comes after them, evidence that they were ever young buried in Patrick McMullan's photo database. More » -
online advertising
Barry Diller, IAC, kick out third-party ad networks
After selling its premium advertising inventory, the 63 companies that used to make up Barry Diller's IAC sell the remnants to third-party ad networks, which pay $1 or $1.50 per thousand pagviews. Not a great business. In an effort to boost those CPMs nearer to $6, IAC will from now on instead pool the inventory from the 63 companies and then divide it up based on advertiser-friendly demographics. AdAge reports that IAC will define its wealthy users, for example, as More »






































