Tina Brown to release The Daily Beast

In a move that will doubtless confuse people who never heard of its 70-year-old namesake, the soon-to-be-launched web venture of editor Tina Brown is to be called The Daily Beast. That was the name of the newspaper central to Waugh's 1938 novel Scoop and it was a thinly disguised sendup of the Daily Express. Gawker, the Manhattan media blog, reports that Brown's intentions were outed by gossip columnist Liz Smith.

Brown, who had a reputation for throwing other people's money at every project she headed, says Gawker, including The New Yorker and Vanity Fair and, particularly, the failed magazine Talk, has been spending gobs of entrepreneur Barry Diller's money on the web venture.