The Daily Beast - publication

From Wikipedia:
The Daily Beast is an American news reporting and opinion website founded and published by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. About one-third of its content is original, while the rest is aggregated links to articles written by other news outlets. The Daily Beast was launched on October 6, 2008, and is owned by IAC. Edward Felsenthal, a former Wall Street Journal editor, is the site's executive editor, and Stephen Colvin is its president.

The name of the site is derived from that of the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop.

Format
One of the features of The Daily Beast is the "Cheat Sheet", billed as "must reads from all over". Published daily, the "Cheat Sheet" offers a selection of articles from online news outlets on popular stories. The "Cheat Sheet" includes brief summaries of the article, and a link to read the full text of the article on the website of its provider.

Since launch, the site has introduced additional sections, including a video "Cheat Sheet", "Book Beast", "Hungry Beast", and "Sexy Beast", a Fashion and Entertainment section. The site frequently creates encyclopedic landing pages on topical subjects such as Obama’s inauguration, the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, Michael Jackson, the Iran uprising, and the US Open.

The Daily Beast contributors include: Christopher Buckley, Scott Turow, Mark McKinnon, Douglas Rushkoff, Matthew Yglesias, Meghan McCain, Reihan Salam, Tony Blair, Condoleezza Rice, Gerald Posner, Simon Schama, Eric Alterman, Reza Aslan, Fatima Bhutto and others including Brown herself.

Major advertising, from brands such as HBO, British Airways, Bottega Veneta, Patricia Cornwell, and Bravo!, are featured on the site.

Popularity
According to a New York Times article, The Daily Beast had reached three million unique visitors per month as of September 28, 2009.

Beast Books
In September 2009, The Daily Beast launched a publishing initiative entitled Beast Books that will produce books by Beast writers on an accelerated publishing schedule.

Plagiarism controversy
In February 2010 it was claimed by Jack Shafer of Slate.com that the chief investigative reporter for The Daily Beast, Gerald Posner, had lifted five sentences from a Miami Herald article and claimed that he had written them himself and was able to publish them in The Daily Beast under his own name. Shafer also discovered that Posner had written plagiarised content from a Miami Herald blog, a Miami Herald editorial, Texas Lawyer magazine and a healthcare journalism blog. An immediate internal investigation by The Daily Beast led to Posner's departure.