Tina Brown, V2.0

Media mogul, literary fixture and friend of royalty, Tina Brown. (Keith Bedford/Reuters)

Unless you follow the goings-on of New York City's lit scene with the rapt fascination of narcs listening to a wiretap, the thought, "Hrm, I wonder what Tina Brown's been doing with her time" may not have crossed your mind in the last year and a bit since Brown released The Diana Chronicles, her biography of the late princess (who also happened to be Brown's good friend).

Nevertheless, the British ex-pat's media ventures tend to be noteworthy, whether or not they're as successful as she anticipates (see Talk, her short-lived glossy magazine, which folded in the wake of 9/11). Prior to the Talk debacle, the award-winning journalist helmed Tatler, was the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair for eight years and ran the venerable New Yorker between 1992 and 1998.

And now, at long last, Brown has dipped her toe in the shark-infested waters of the Web. Her new zeitgeisty site The Daily Beast (the name, o nerds, is a nod to Evelyn Waugh's Scoop) launched today in an ad-free beta form.

First impressions: Brown's clearly put a lot of effort into the clean, boxy, print-ish look of the site (word has it that corporate backer Barry Diller shelled out substantial cash for consults with top designers), with neat details like left-margin titles that zip down the page as you scroll through articles. While the content has a nice bathroom-reading-for-intellectuals feel to it, I'm still not convinced Brown's offering anything you couldn't find elsewhere on the web -- or if she is, I'm not convinced we want to read it. Was the world really waiting for a blog post in which Project Runway runner-up Laura Bennett comes out as a proud laissez-faire mom?

That said, the Daily Beast's still in its (very, very) early stages, and with news of the recent cuts in the Gawker universe, perhaps the mediasphere is in need of another portal for newsy cultural reportage.

--Sarah Liss