PARTY LIKE IT’S 1999: Mickey Kaus has some fun with the New York Times’ profile of Tina Brown of Newsweek/The Daily Beast aka Beastweek:

P.S.: I especially admired the sentence brushing aside the Daily Beast’s not-good-enough web stats:

While The Beast, as Brown calls it, is a long way from profitability, it’s an impressive achievement whose relatively few visitors (just under four million uniques per month) belie its cultural influence.

Reminds me of the skillful paragraph in Newsweek’s 1996 cover story hyping Seattle, dealing with the inconvenient fact that the city was not growing:

SOONER OR LATER, IT SEEMS, everyone moves to Seattle, or thinks about it, or at least their kids do. The city is a demographic paradox, a place whose population — 532,900 in 1995 — is essentially stable, yet …

In the end, it almost doesn’t matter if the Hitler diaries are genuine the Beast’s numbers are good or not …

Over the weekend, we mentioned the ozone layer of the Times’ editorial department and its seeming inability of  to get new media as diverse as the Huffington Post and Twitter. So why would they get this strange shotgun marriage of new media and old?

In contrast: “Drudge Report: Small Operation, Large Influence.” More here.