Tina Brown's Daily Beast, the glitziest Web filter in town

The Daily Beast, Tina Brown's culture and news website, went up Monday, and in case any puzzlement remains about what she's up to, there's a long Q&A with Brown herself laying it out. The site, she says, is not an "aggregator," as some have called it, including me here. Meaning it will not merely collect stories a la Yahoo News, but will "sift, sort and curate" the Web every day, combining some original stuff with links to other sites' content.

Whether that's "aggregation" or not, it's a fairly standard approach to the Web. So Brown includes the key question in her Q&A: "Why should I visit you?"

"Sensibility, darling," is her answer. She hopes that if you like the site's sensibility in "choosing news and opinion, then you'll trust us to be the lens you view it through."

I'm not convinced you can sell a site on "sensibility" alone. That's like offering "value" to stockholders. Brown might have told us a little more specifically what her particular sensibility is, and what it will add to our lives.

But I'll try to glean it myself. Judging by the first two days of the site's existence -- admittedly a limited sample, and every site evolves -- I'd describe The Daily Beast as a thematic relative of her defunct Talk Magazine. There's a bravura, devil-may-care tone in the display text and in the writing the site has commissioned. It's perfectly captured in a blog post from Brown herself on Sarah Palin. Brown celebrates the candidate's sex appeal to both men and women, Republicans and Democrats -- she's "hitting the hot buttons of bipartisan horniness even as her hope fades of attracting the hot flash vote of Hillary Clinton supporters." In that one phrase we see Brown at her best: clever, daring, randy.

It can be fun to watch her spin and dip heedlessly through what interests her, which is anything that inhabits any elite echelon of the culture. It can also be tiring. Brown has an unquestioning admiration of power, fame and conventional kinds of success, and that sets the tone for the site as a whole (and may explain why the age of contributors and subjects skews to over-45, and the sex of its contributors skews male, just as in most mainstream magazines). Thumbnails of the faces of prominent, prosperous Boomers are everywhere on the site: Bill Clinton, Arianna Huffington, Christiane Amanpour, NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly, among others, give book and DVD recommendations, for example.

You could carp about how the site is behind the times, not "webby" -- the blog roll, for example, is displayed too prominently, with no apparent principle of selection other than a preponderance of big, well-known sites; there are no community-building goals in evidence on the Daily Beast's home page -- no sign that any mere reader's presence would be welcome. So far, the site is talking at us, not with us.

I'm not sure a Web filter benefits from the kind of Upper East Side professional-class sensibility The Daily Beast is conveying at this point. Both Drudge and the Huffington Post have succeeded, in part, by keeping a common touch: The Huffington Post's lifestyle stuff, for example, tends to be on a homey, Ladies' Home Journal level ("How to Recession-Proof Your Family"); Drudge serves up supermarket-tabloidish scares and oddities ("Man Accused of Binding Teen's Hands on Flight"). What sensibilities the two sites have derive from their political slants (left for HuffPo, right for Drudge).

But The Daily Beast wants to be down the middle politically, which is not going to inspire the kind of visceral responses HuffPo and Drudge depend on. Without a guiding passion like politics -- or something else addictive and attitude-filled, like celebrity news -- maybe a good Web filter doesn't even need much personality, in the end. Helping us find cool stuff should be the main point, not jazzing up the way you link to it. Remember when we first got answering machines, and everyone wanted to express something through their outgoing message? Now, do you know anyone who would do a Chevy Chase impression or put an REM song on their greeting? Same with ring tones--a ring does the job more efficiently than a Bananarama tune. As we get comfortable with a technology, it seems to me, we gravitate toward its pure functionality.

Anyway, as Web filters go, I like Google Reader's soothingly personality-free interface. The more I use it, the less I want to go to visually busy, design-y sites like The Daily Beast, which look like they're trying to emulate the look of magazines -- not the best use of a computer screen. On Google Reader, I've "subscribed" to the websites and blogs I like, and I've sorted them into categories. I get a constantly updated scroll of each one's new material, with just headlines and lead paragraphs, which is enough to judge if I want to read the whole thing. So I can sort and edit the Web -- including any original content the Daily Beast has that I might want to read -- all by myself, thank you.

I fear the Daily Beast is the Web equivalent of the intrusive staff at some "luxury" hotels, constantly bothering you with offers of help you don't actually need. As the jet-setting Brown should know, the really high-end hotels these days have a famously "invisible" staff that anticipates and fulfills your every need before you even realize they're there.

--Maria Russo