The Daily Beast: Lively or lazy?
We at Shift. firmly believe that a healthy balanced information diet of media outlets is essential to the functioning of one’s brain. Much like Sarah Palin, we read most of them with a great appreciation for the press for the media. Specifically, you ask? Um, all of ‘em, any of ‘em that um have been in front of us over all these years, um…
So it is with great interest that we’ve watched today’s launch of The Daily Beast, IAC’s attempt to edit the web.
From a design perspective there are some clever features that seem to target real needs, or fears, people have with managing information overload:
- The ‘Cheat Sheet’ gives you 10 daily must-reads so you don’t come off as a retard at the next cocktail party or CBS News interview.
- The ‘Big Fat Story’ is reminiscent of the immortal BMP Guardian ad and attempts to give multiple points of view on one key story.
- The ‘Buzz Board’ gives you some snappy picks from famous smart people in the hope that their genius somehow rubs off on you, presumably sans the libido in the case of Bill Clinton.
- All original content has a convenient pop-up bio by the contributor’s name so you can apply the appropriate discount rate to what you’re reading.
All of this is fine and dandy, but we’re left with two questions. First, on a practical level, will this format prove to be too constricting in the longer run? Can you really boil the world down to one big fat story and a cheat sheet on the rest, especially within a daily news cycle without the benefit of perspective?
Second, on a philosophical level, should people really be outsourcing the editing of their information diet to one person, or one group of people, no matter how brilliant or well meaning? With tools like Google Reader making it easy to do yourself, we are not convinced.
All in all The Daily Beast gets points for trying, but we’re not canceling our Economist subscription just yet.
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