Tina Brown: Newsweek Daily Beast Will Be Profitable in 'Two to Three Years'

At Monday night's New York Deadline Club Awards dinner, Tina Brown discussed Newsweek Daily Beast’s future with New York Post media reporter Keith Kelly—and said that it would take several years for the company to become profitable.

“Can Newsweek as an entity survive?” was Kelly’s first question. “No publication today can exist without reinventing itself,” Brown replied, but “Newsweek has a terrific role to play.” She added, “The great strength of this merged operation is that we are working on both [a weekly magazine and daily website].”

Asked when the venture would be profitable, Brown said that the Daily Beast was conceived in 2008 with a five-year plan, “on which we are very, very handsomely along the way,” while Newsweek is “an iconic global brand” that landed 40 ad campaigns in 40 days earlier this year. “So we have absolute confidence,” she said, “given this new world we're in, given the energy of the Daily Beast digital brand, that we can reactivate Newsweek.”

As for a more specific profitability time frame, Brown estimated, “In the next two to three years.”