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.