Daily Beast

So why is Dan Lyons, a tech journalist who earned an international reputation with brilliant and sometimes savage satires of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, now being so snotty and unbearable in BeastWeek about the disclosability of Steve Jobs’ health problems? I think the world officially has a new “Least Appropriate High Horse Ever” titleist. Surely Lyons must sense how the “Now that his cancer’s probably back, Igottatellya I really loved the guy all along” schtick looks?

From the New York Observer, word that the failed negotiation between nonogenarian millionaire-not-billionaire Newsweek bailer-outer Sidney Harman and Daily Beast proprietor Barry Diller didn’t actually fail; it seems likely to produce a deal by which Newsweek and the Daily Beast will merge, with Tina Brown editing the whole online-offline shebang.

Newsmakers of the week

I confess I’m loving the Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s latest attempt to mix sensational and serious journalism. (She remade Vanity Fair in the ’80s, revived The New Yorker in the ’90s — though yes, I greatly prefer both magazines under the editors who succeeded her — and faceplanted with Talk after that.) Daily Beast is a mix of aggregating, reporting and blogging, clearly designed to take on Huffington Post. It’s existing in a financial fantasy world for the moment, pushing out high-impact original journalism and selling no ads, a path the National Post trod in its early years, with the results we all know. But for however long it lasts, it’s high-calorie fun. Here’s Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s campaign manger, describing the moment when he realized his candidate couldn’t win. It was about five weeks before the vote — coincidentally, the length of a standard Canadian general-election campaign.