The site, Brown tells Radar, will have "no ideological stance" and will be edited by Edward Felsenthal, the former deputy managing editor of the Wall Street Journal who is currently a consultant at Portfolio. (We hear that two business editors at the New York Times were also contacted about jobs, but didn't bite.) Brown declined to offer specifics on either a launch date or about what, exactly, the site hopes to accomplish, saying only that it would be "a new take on an aggregator website."
The news comes on the heels of a New York Times report that the Huffington Post, a lefty news aggregator and blogging vessel for various celebrities, celebrity offspring, and the college roommates of celebrity offspring, is worth a staggering $200 million. Arianna Huffington, the site's namesake and founder, is a close friend of Brown's. (The two even kind of look the same!) Brown, however, stresses that her site will not be a direct HuffPo competitor.
Brown's decision to partner with 65-year-old Diller comes at a critical juncture for IAC. Though the aging Internet titan recently won a protracted legal battle against Liberty Media Corp's John Malone for control over IAC, the company's value has declined from $22 billion to just over $7 billion in five years. Many of IAC's recent high-profile Web ventures, including the search engine Ask, political humor site 23/6, and FiLife, have fizzled. It remains to be seen whether Brown's "new take" on news aggregation will be enough to right the ship.