Turmoil at the Daily Beast has staffers headed for the exits

Weeks into former president Donald Trump’s criminal trial this spring, Joanna Coles — one of two veteran media bosses trying to inject new life into the Daily Beast — had a story idea.

Like many digital-era editors, she sometimes thinks of story ideas in terms of their headline appeal. In this case, Coles had a very specific request, according to three people who attended the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve confidences:

She wanted a story with a headline asking whether Trump would get raped in prison.

Even at the Beast — a news site known for its aggressive reporting and irreverent tabloid-style tendencies — the idea of writing a story speculating about an ex-president being sexually assaulted would’ve been unheard of before April, when Coles and former ABC executive Ben Sherwood took over the company. But by the time of the meeting, Daily Beast reporters were used to these kind of ideas from Coles, the former editor of Cosmopolitan who is now the Beast’s chief creative and content officer.

There had been the story idea about the most obese members of Congress. And a plan to investigate whether Trump was passing gas in court and, if so, why. Like the prison-rape idea, those stories never ran.

But even as staffers adjust to the Beast’s heat-seeking new “Boanna” era — their nickname for a new executive team — they are grappling with the brutal economics of the media industry.

After years of relative stability, dozens of staffers are headed for the exits this week. Twenty-two people — roughly 60% of the site’s unionized journalists — have accepted a buyout package. And eight nonunion staffers, including several editors, were laid off Thursday. (The author of this article worked at the Daily Beast from 2018 to 2023.)

In an email to staffers Thursday, Sherwood described the move as a measure of “new financial discipline to reposition and reset the Beast.”

Sherwood, who is publisher and CEO, said his team will unveil a new strategy Monday, along with a new newsroom and business structure in mid-July, when they’ll mark roughly 100 days in charge of the site.

“While this has been painful, we have now met the target that we set for reducing our overall spending,” Sherwood wrote to employees.

Since its founding in 2008 by former New Yorker and Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, the Daily Beast has competed with better-funded competitors for news, landing scoops on entertainment, national security and the Trump administration. In 2022, the site produced bombshell reporting on abortion and domestic violence allegations against Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker.

As larger rivals such as Vice News and BuzzFeed News ceased to exist amid a business downturn for digital media, the Daily Beast — nestled within the tech-and-media conglomerate IAC — managed to avoid layoffs.

But the site did lose millions of dollars for its parent company, and it was put up for sale in 2023. This spring, Coles and Sherwood purchased a combined 49% stake in the company, while IAC kept 51%.

Several current and former staffers at the Daily Beast soon found themselves alternately baffled and alarmed by the pair’s management style. In their first meeting with staff, Sherwood grew argumentative after a reporter asked him how the pair would avoid the mistakes of the Messenger, the short-lived news start-up centered around massive online traffic plays that blew through tens of millions in dollars before folding in January.

Sherwood, who spoke to The Post on behalf of himself and Coles, argues that the pair have a proven record in the media business, pointing to his experience running ABC News and the Disney ABC Television Group, and Coles’s work at Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire and as chief content officer of Hearst Magazines.

“What we are is people who have done this before,” Sherwood told The Washington Post. “We have turned organizations around.”

Soon after the pair started, though, one of Coles’s other jobs drew concern about potential conflicts of interest. She is a longtime member of the board of Snap, which operates the short-form video app Snapchat, a role that pays her $377,747, according to its most recent Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Coles’s first weeks at the Daily Beast coincided with Congress passing a bill requiring the Chinese owner of TikTok to sell the social media platform — a main rival of Snapchat. According to two people who attended editorial meetings, she expressed interest in negative stories about TikTok. In one session, Coles acknowledged the conflict of interest and said she should probably recuse herself from TikTok coverage but continued to be involved in story decisions anyway, according to the two attendees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve internal relationships.

“She really pushed to cover things that were bad for TikTok,” said one of the attendees, who no longer works at the Daily Beast.

Coles often starts meetings by talking about what she’s “obsessed” with, a list that has included the death of “Super Size Me” documentarian Morgan Spurlock, Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s impending prison sentence and singer Celine Dion’s stiff-person-syndrome diagnosis, according to recordings of meetings obtained by The Post.

Coles has also been interested in coverage of Barron Trump, who turned 18 in March. After Coles and Sherwood took over, the Beast staff launched an internal “Barron” room on the messaging app Slack to coordinate its ongoing coverage of the ex-president’s youngest child, according to a screenshot of the room viewed by The Post.

Based on a tip from Coles, the website ran an article claiming Barron Trump would attend New York University. In an unusual move, the story did not include an author byline. New York magazine reported that Coles joked to colleagues: “Let’s hope it’s true!”

Staffers have often struggled to implement Coles’s wilder ideas. In a May meeting with political reporters, staff expressed concerns that pursuing ideas such as Donald Trump’s flatulence would hurt their reputations and ruin delicate relationships with sources.

Sherwood assured staffers in the meeting they didn’t actually have to pursue many of Coles’s ideas. And in his interview with The Post, he defended her proposals as part of a creative editorial process, describing her as a “hilarious British character that is full of life and full of ideas.”

“She is like a defibrillator in an organization that was needing some electric shocks to get it going,” Sherwood said.

The Daily Beast had traditionally punched above its weight in Washington coverage. But politics reporters and editors, including former Washington bureau chief Matt Fuller, were among those who fled the publication after the management change.

In May, Fuller was replaced as bureau chief by Martin Pengelly, an editor from the Guardian. But Pengelly himself gave notice after just five weeks on the job, the Hollywood Reporter first reported. In a staff meeting last week, he noted that he had too few reporters to plan coverage around Thursday’s presidential debate.

In another meeting this month, Hugh Dougherty — who recently replaced Tracy Connor as editor in chief — proposed a “MAGA young power list” ranking the most important Trump lieutenants. (“Use it to butter up your sources by all means, or to crap on their enemies, or whatever it is,” he joked, according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by The Post.)

Luis Rendon, a senior photo editor and chairman of the Daily Beast union, says that more staffers than required signed up for the buyout — an indication of their discontent with Coles and Sherwood’s plans.

“They’re incredulous,” Rendon said. “They can’t believe so many people are leaving.”

Sherwood describes the buyout packages as “extremely generous” and says they will help reposition the Daily Beast for the future.

“We will turn that around in one year, and we will be a stable — I would guess profitable — business sometime next year,” he said.