Barry Diller | The New York Observer

Ricky Van Veen, CollegeHumor Co-Creator, Graduates to a New Notional Spinoff

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:50:20 -0400

After ten years creating online comedy content geared toward making frat boys chuckle from their laptops, CollegeHumor co-creator and editor in chief Ricky Van Veen is graduating to a new venture at Barry Diller's IAC. By the end of this year, he'll transition into a position as chief executive of Notional, a CollegeHumor spinoff production company that will create programming for the Web--and traditional TV--for all demographics, even (gulp!) girls.

"I...

Ben Silverman's New IAC Company Will Get Cozy With Advertisers

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 10:59:14 -0400

As announced this morning, NBC Entertainment co-chair Ben Silverman will leave his post to join Barry Diller at IAC. He'll head up a multi-platform production company (which doesn't have a name just yet). Jeff Gaspin, who was in charge of NBCU’s cable division (Bravo, SyFy Channel, USA Network, etc.) will replace his seat next to Marc Graboff. Mr. Silverman created The Office and The Biggest Loser with his own production company, Reveille, before joining...

Who Will Be Seated at the High Line's $100,000 Dinner Tables on Monday?

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:25:55 -0400

On the evening of Monday, June 15, at 6 p.m., the High Line in Chelsea will host a big opening party to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the structure and the 10th anniversary of the the city's efforts to revive it. It will honor benefactors like actor Edward Norton; IAC chairman Barry Diller and his wife, designer Diane von Furstenberg; and hedge fund director Philip Falcone and wife Lisa Maria.

Earlier this month, Mr. Diller...

Rock 'n' Blogroll: Diller, Murdoch, Zucker Friend Each Other at Internet Week Soiree

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:25:51 -0400

...

The Observer's Guide to Geekery at Internet Week New York

Fri, 29 May 2009 14:27:49 -0400

All of the city’s young digerati will be Twittering about Internet Week New York starting Monday, June 1. Expect everyone from your regular Googlers and Facebookers to College Humor’s Jake & Amir, AOL’s newly minted executive Tim Armstrong, Barry Diller, Digg’s Kevin Rose and even Al Gore out on the town.

The “week” is packed with so many Web media panels, start-up contests and boozy mixers that organizers tacked on another day for...

Meghan McCain's Book Sold to Hyperion For High Six Figures

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:18:21 -0400

John McCain's 24-year-old daughter Meghan has a book deal! Sources say Hyperion has prevailed over at least three other publishers in an auction that began earlier this week, following a round of meetings during which the in-your-face young conservative and the literary agent she shares with her father, Sterling Lord Literistic president Flip Brophy, discussed a number of possible approaches to the book with editors around town.

Several sources said the advance Ms. McCain will...

Edward Felsenthal on Life at The Daily Beast: 'It's Exhausting'

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:43:14 -0400

"In my most exhausted moments, I think about the story on the front page of The New York Times about bloggers having heart attacks," said Edward Felsenthal, executive editor of the Daily Beast, said at at the PSFK Conference at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park today. By way of explaining the frenetic pace of editing a Web site, he told the crowd one of the "office jokes" exchanged over IM among...

Vegging Out: Sir Paul and Stella McCartney Espouse Meatless, Hybrid Lifestyle at Eco-A-List Bash

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:57:55 -0400

“My daughter is getting an award so I’m a proud duh-dee!” Paul McCartney told the Daily Transom at the Natural Resources Defense Council’s annual Forces for Nature benefit at 583 Park Avenue on Monday, March 30, where his daughter, fashion designer Stella McCartney, and Discovery Communications’ CEO David Zaslav were honored for their respective environmental work.

Mr. McCartney, wearing a lightweight European aristo scarf indoors, was accompanied by his lady friend, M.T.A. board member Nancy Shevell,...

Tina Brown Says Advertising is Coming to the Daily Beast By Spring, Darling; 'We're Getting A Lot of Overtures'

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:42:10 -0500

Last night, at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Tina Brown told a few hundred young J-school students that the Daily Beast—which Barry Diller finances and said won't come close to turning a profit for two or three years, "if then"—that there is indeed a revenue model for the Web site.

"Our business model will be based on advertising," she said. "We believe, Barry Diller believes, that the advertising model is going to work...

The College Humor Show, Starring Ricky Van Veen as Ricky Van Veen

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:03:46 -0500

On Thursday, Feb. 5, the spacious lobby of Barry Diller's IAC iceberg building along the West Side Highway was filled with shaggy-haired 20-something guys in ill-fitting suits and 20-something tattooed girls in H&M dresses, who were there to celebrate the premiere of MTV's The College Humor Show.

The show is based on the 10-year-old College Humor Web site of which, in a piece published in 2005, the New Yorker's Rebecca Mead wrote, "Girls without...

Will There Be No More Billionaires in the Year 2009?

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:05:59 -0500

As the year comes to a close, the Business Sheet has taken a tally of how much this city's moguls have lost in the great economic bonfire of 2008. The damage--which reaches into the billions--makes us wonder if when the economic cleansing is all said and done, if there will even be any more billionaires left in New York City.

So as you hit the bottle this holiday season, consider this: at least you...

Waiting for Rupert: Michael Wolff Fetes Murdoch Bio as Guests Search For Mogul

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 07:48:26 -0500

Michael Wolff invited fifty people from News Corp to his book party last night celebrating his biography of Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, at Milk Studios in West Chelsea, but none of them showed.

"None of them RSVP'd, none of them said yes or no," he said last night, while speaking to a reporter, Gabriel Snyder from Gawker, Gawker czar Nick Denton and David Carey, the group president of Condé...

Bill O'Reilly Names Names: Fox News Host Visibly Displeased to Say (Shudder) 'Hendrik'

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 12:52:52 -0500

Tina Brown and Barry Diller's Daily Beast (A thousand more hours, a thousand more hours!) has a video of Fox News' Bill O'Reilly dispatching a correspondent to ambush interview The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg on the streets of New York. Apparently Mr. O'Reilly felt Mr. Hertzberg misquoted his interview with Newt Gringrich, and wanted him to apologize. (This comes via Michael Calderone's Politico blog.)

What's amusing about the video isn't the low-budget Michael...

Recession, Reshmession! The Party Must Go On, Says Barry Diller, Chocolate Fountains and All!

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:17:00 -0500

In November, the employees at Barry Diller’s media conglomerate, IAC, were unsure whether the company would throw a holiday party.

The season, after all, has not been kind to media employees used to a year-end bacchanal on the company dime. In October, the Hearst Corporation canceled its annual party at Tavern on the Green. Then the president of ABC News, David Westin, made a similar announcement. Then came...

The Web Guru

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:10:05 -0500

If you wanted to wipe out the American media establishment in one blow, you might have targeted the Grand Ballroom on the third floor of the Plaza hotel at around 9 a.m. on Nov. 12.

The Foursquare Conference was organized by media mogul Steve Rattner’s Quadrangle Partners, and had the kind of exclusive list Mr. Rattner is known for. Barry Diller attended the conference, as did Lachlan Murdoch, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and Tribune...

Big Shake-Up at New York Tech Meetup

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:11:10 -0500

On Nov. 11, Scott Heiferman looked small standing in front of the glowing, 11-foot-high video walls in the lobby of Barry Diller’s glittering, $100 million InterActiveCorp building on West 18th Street. “There’s a great President-elect Barack Obama line which is: We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for,” he said, microphone in hand, buttoned-down shirt unbuttoned.

Mr. Heiferman, the charasmatic co-founder and chief executive of social networking site Meetup.com,...

Barry Diller Announces $14.8 Million in Losses at IAC/InterActive Corporation

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 10:33:21 -0500

IAC /InterActive Corporation Chairman Barry Diller took a gamble this summer by spinning off the HSN shopping channel, the Ticketmaster, LendingTree.com and time-share business Interval Leisure Group. In a conference call yesterday, he announced the consequences: $14.8 million in loss, or 11 cents per share, compared with a profit of $70.5 million or 47 cents per share this time last year, according to Bloomberg (via The New York Post). Yikes.

Mr. Diller spun it...

Writer Inveighs Against Lip Dub Videos; Makes Lip Dub Videos

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:59:09 -0400

Today on The Daily Beast, Tina Brown and Barry Diller's literally hundreds of hours old Web site, Randi Zuckerberg sallies forth a bold, truly shocking statement: It Must Be Stopped: Hipster Lip Dub Videos. (Insert your own exclamation points interspersed with number 1s here.)

This is perhaps the second most powerful statement by the site since last week when The Beast stood athwart tooth-whitening yelling Stop. But this critique, aimed at young people...

A Look Back: The Daily Beast's First 100 Hours

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:23:17 -0400

On Monday, as you no doubt already know, Tina Brown and Barry Diller launched The Daily Beast, a Web site that promises to "sift" and "curate" the unruly Internet.

Ms. Brown noted in a launch Q&A that her site would not be a boring old news aggregator, since sifting and curating are very different verbs from aggregating. In that Q&A, Ms. Brown trumpeted her new staff, including, "Edward Felsenthal, our executive editor, came...

'Dinosaur' Brown Launches Daily Beast

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 08:06:40 -0400

Tina Brown and Barry Diller's new Web site, The Daily Beast, has launched. In a Q&A, Ms. Brown explains why her site is different from other news aggregators like The Drudge Report, The Huffington Post, Newser, Brijit, et al.:

The Daily Beast doesn't aggregate. It sifts, sorts, and curates. We're as much about what's not there as what is. And we freshen the stream with a good helping of our own original content from a...

Behold, The Mark of the Beast!

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:10:10 -0400

The Daily Beast, Tina Brown and Barry Diller's nascent Web venture, was supposed to launch yesterday, as Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici pointed out on his Mixed Media blog.

While Ms. Brown's much-anticipated entry into the news aggregation business continues to be fashionably late, the site does have a new landing page. And that landing page has a logo!

As one forward-looking pundit wrote, probably around the time Ms. Brown announced the project:

The darkness...

Tina Brown Misses Hillary Clinton; Calls 2008 Convention a 'Much Bigger Deal' Than Last Time

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:53:53 -0400

DENVER--Last night, Denver mayor John Hickenlooper and his wife, New Yorker writer Helen Thorpe, hosted a party in honor of Slate’s just-released ObamaMania book, but there was another more infamous member of the New Yorker family in the room. Tina Brown was wearing an electric blue suit that certainly stood out against the wood molding and green wallpaper of downtown Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore.

She stayed close to the exit, sipping white wine...

Five-Way Split for Diller's IAC/InterActive Corp. Completed

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 10:38:33 -0400

According to the Associated Press, Barry Diller's redundantly-named IAC/InteractiveCorp is splitting into five publicly traded companies. Presumably, there will be 10 names between them.

According to AP:

With the split, home shopping network HSN Inc., time-share business Interval Leisure Group Inc., ticketing service Ticketmaster and lending and real estate business Tree.com Inc. are due to begin regular trading Thursday under their own ticker symbols. The symbols are "HSNI" for HSN, "IILG" for Interval, "TKTM"...

Brijit, We Hardly Used Ye

Fri, 16 May 2008 12:11:03 -0400

It seems like just yesterday—well, late October, anyway—Brijit.com, the website that read and summarized magazines, was launched. At the time, The Washington Post's Frank Ahrens profiled Brijit's founder, Jeremy Brosowsky, and wrote, "[T]he Internet is littered with good ideas that turn out to be bad businesses, and online publishing can be especially tricky: Do you go mass-market or niche? Subscription-based, or free and ad-supported? Original content or aggregation of other content?"

Yesterday, the...

Morning Memo: Elle 'Aufs' Nina Garcia; Elton John Gets a Big Whiff of Tom Ford

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 08:54:10 -0400

Nina Garcia, You. Are. Out. The Project Runway judge reportedly got fired from her post as fashion director at Elle magazine last week. [US Weekly]

Barry Diller who's recently triumphed in court over Liberty Media chairman, John Malone, has a brand new discrimination lawsuit on his hands. [P6]

Salman Rushdie is so over Padma Lakshmi. [P6]

Elton John really likes the way Tom Ford smells. [P6]

Donald Trump Jr. threatened Ivana Trump's new husband, Rossano Rubicondi,...

Tina Brown and Barry Diller to Start an 'Aggregator Site'

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:34:33 -0400

Over at Radar, Neel Shah is reporting that Tina Brown is partnering with Barry Diller to develop what Ms. Brown called "a new take on an aggregator website."

Edward Felsenthal, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal, will be the editor. There aren't many other details—Brown didn't give a launch date, or really any specifics—but apparently there will be no "ideological stance."

So will it be more like the Huffington Post or Michael Woolf's aggregator...

Barry Diller to 'Change the Way the Black Community Drives the Web'

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:13:47 -0500

The Media Mob just received an invitation to an April 9 launch party for a new InterActive Corp. Web site called RushmoreDrive.com, hosted by IAC CEO Barry Diller and RushmoreDrive CEO Johnny Taylor. But just what is RushmoreDrive? The invite claims that it will be "the web destination that will change the way the Black community Drives the Web." (Drive! Oh, we get it.) Currently, its Web site just says, "Discover More Here Spring...

Diller, Graydon Put Oscar Parties on Chiller, But Others Plow Ahead

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:54:18 -0500

With the writers’ strike and all, what’s goin’ on with the Oscar parties? Vanity Fair’s is canceled, the magazine said in a statement on Tuesday. Feb. 5. Barry Diller’s annual luncheon is also off, a spokeswoman, Leslie Cafferty, confirmed to the Transom.

But art dealer Larry Gagosian is still having his shindig, this year celebrating the paintings of artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel. “It is an annual art opening he has been...

It’s Diller Time!

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 20:02:41 -0500

On far West 18th Street—past the housing projects and the parking lots and the auto-body shops, where the High Line is home not to condos but homeless people—the new, $100 million international headquarters of Barry Diller’s company, InterActiveCorp, rises like an undulating, reflective space station. The lobby is home to the largest video wall in the world, and another video wall, behind the security desk, that shows statistics from various IAC Web sites. Recently,...

The Afternoon Wrap: Wednesday

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 18:18:46 -0400

...

Are You Rich- Or Super-Rich? Baby, Take My Quiz!

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 19:00:00 -0500

As close readers of The New York Times will attest, the paper of record has recently thrown itself headlong into what is unquestionably the most pressing social issue of our time: the ever-growing economic disparity between the rich and the super-rich.

In a series of hard-hitting articles, the paper has examined everything from the tyranny of new money on old friendships to the netherworld of executive compensation, to the painful socioeconomic choices being...

Are You Rich— Or Super-Rich? Baby, Take My Quiz!

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 19:00:00 -0500

As close readers of The New York Times will attest, the paper of record has recently thrown itself headlong into what is unquestionably the most pressing social issue of our time: the ever-growing economic disparity between the rich and the super-rich. In a series of hard-hitting articles, the paper has examined everything from the tyranny of new money on old friendships to the netherworld of executive compensation, to the painful socioeconomic choices being made...

Manhattan Swept Up In Zillow's Midnight Ride

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 19:00:00 -0500

At midnight on Feb. 8, the mysterious new Web site created by the swashbuckling Web entrepreneur Richard Barton was scheduled to go live. If all goes as planned—at press time, it appeared it would—it’s going to be a weird moment.

The story of Zillow.com has been, from start to finish, an anachronism: a stealth start-up formed in a whorl of rumor by an old god of the Internet boom (Mr. Barton founded Expedia.com);...

Fear and Anxiety At Academy Awards: A Ritual Shilling

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 19:00:00 -0500

Several days before Oscar weekend, I was in a studio executive's office discussing a script. As the rain pounded the windows, I asked what she thought of the awards, and the fact that her division of the studio-the main division-had been overshadowed in the completion by its smaller, quasi-independent sister.

"It's irrelevant," she said. "It's a sideshow." She pointed at a wall filled with story boards for an upcoming picture whose title ends with a...

A Modish Proposal: Restylin' The Times–Whassup, Newsies?

Sun, 13 Jun 2004 20:00:00 -0400

EDITOR'S NOTE: After a long and painstaking review of the editorial process here at The New York Times , along with a long and sobering look at the rise of adult-onset attention-deficit disorder, along with a clear and pragmatic need to increase our appeal among upscale readers, The Times is pleased to announce a slight shift in our editorial policy.

As of Sunday, June 13, the editors and writers of the Sunday Styles section will...

Eight Day Week

Sun, 26 Oct 2003 19:00:00 -0500

Wednesday 22nd

No more Newlyweds ?! Is there any point to fall? Oh, so what if Jessica's a moron, and the supposedly "smarter" Nick is sucking honey from a beehive he just bombed with Raid, and there's something immensely creepy about her dad, with his horrible highlight job, standing monitoring his daughter's stiffening nipples as her "Sweetest Sin" video was filmed- at least the kids ain't living in sin, like those sticky...

Gore Ogles Cable in Vivendi Stable as His Media Buy

Sun, 07 Sep 2003 20:00:00 -0400

Will the proposed merger of NBC and Vivendi Universal Entertainment, announced on Tuesday, Sept. 2, benefit the political-counterprogramming media dream of Al Gore?

The Observer has learned that the former Vice President and his business partner, the entrepreneur and former Democratic fund-raiser Joel Hyatt-who both have been quietly sussing out the creation of a cable-TV network for the last year-called a meeting with executives of Universal Television Group early this summer to discuss buying Newsworld...

Central Park Turns 150

Sun, 11 May 2003 20:00:00 -0400

On July 21, 1853, New York City made the wisest move it has ever made and purchased over 700 acres of swampland. Over the next 16 years, under the guidance of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the swamp was transformed into the magnificent pastoral oasis we know today.

As Central Park celebrates its 150th anniversary, there are several public events planned, but surely the true glory of the park rests in the private,...

Plucky Jackson, Fresh From U.K., Goes Hollywood

Sun, 09 Jun 2002 20:00:00 -0400

Michael Jackson-the 44-year-old British TV programmer imported by Barry Diller to run Vivendi Universal's USA Network-disliked The Hamptons , Barbara Kopple's two-part documentary for ABC.

"I don't see what they're going to tell me that we don't already know," he said. "Young, dumb people who like to get pissed and laid. Or some starfuckers and some locals who are pissed off, but making money out of it. I think there's a problem with any show...

We're Not Health Freaks: The Park Is Our Mental Valhalla

Sun, 19 May 2002 20:00:00 -0400

Unlike those New Yorkers who are fully invested in self-improvement, I start my days-at least warm spring days-not at the gym lifting weights, running around the reservoir or even bird-watching, but buying a couple of Danishes and a cup of coffee, and heading to the park to eat breakfast and read the paper.

While I'm aware this does little, if anything, to improve my cholesterol count, I'm persuaded it enhances my mental health. I wouldn't...

Americanization of Messier: Vivendi Boss Loses Billions

Sun, 10 Mar 2002 19:00:00 -0500

Three things to take away from Vivendi Universal's March 5 press conference: The company posted a humongous $11.8 billion net loss for 2001; earnings were in line with the media giant's projections, and the people of France still consider Chief Executive Officer Jean-Marie Messier a cultural traitor.

The American media may have missed it, but the first question asked by a French reporter at the press conference concerned the fate of the French cultural...

Diller, ABC in Talks … Walken's Cookin' … CNN Intrigue … Mike O'Malley in Trouble

Sun, 29 Aug 1999 20:00:00 -0400

Wednesday, Aug. 25

A new ruling by the Federal Communications Commission that allows networks to own more than one television station in a big city could mean pay dirt for Barry Diller, who has for years talked about launching a new local broadcast channel. He once called the idea City Vision, and it was to hit New York with programming covering night life, news and sports. It would be like a hipper version of New...

Diller Gets Springer … WB Gets Aliens

Sun, 11 Jul 1999 20:00:00 -0400

Wednesday, July 7

Barry Diller gave the order in the spring of '98: no more fighting on The Jerry Springer Show ! Well, a couple of public outcries and media-fueled mass murders later, Mr. Diller has finally brought order to the program, which is owned by his Studios U.S.A. Nothing good lasts forever. "We will either produce a show without profanity, violence or physical confrontation, or the show won't be produced by us," Mr. Diller...

Barry Diller's Defining Moment: Will He Save MST3K ?

Sun, 14 Mar 1999 19:00:00 -0500

One of the most gratifying aspects of writing this column over the past

four years or so has been the number and variety of crusades (and feuds) I've had the pleasure of pursuing on behalf of cultural obsessions. Not all of them have been successful. Books & Company is gone, although the campaign to save it crystallized, if only briefly, a beautiful community of impassioned readers and writers in support of a place that was not just a unique bookstore,...