Magazine queen Tina Brown to leave The Daily Beast
Former Vanity Fair boss will quit website at end of year to launch conference company
Tina Brown, one of the world's best-known magazine editors, is leaving the world of publishing.
Brown announced on Wednesday she would step down as editor-in-chief of the website The Daily Beast and start her own conference company.
The departure will end, for now, a magazine career that received much acclaim for her stewardship of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, but less so for Talk magazine and the merger of The Daily Beast and Newsweek.
It will also end her publishing partnership with her financial backer, Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, which began in 2008 when they founded The Daily Beast.
Brown, 59, said in a statement she would start Tina Brown Live Media, which will focus on building up the Women in the World conferences she has been organising for several years.
At a meeting with the Daily Beast staff, Brown said she would remain until the end of the year, when her contract expires.
"It has been wonderful to grow the Women in the World summit into such a powerful, independent brand within The Daily Beast, and now it will be even more exciting to see how it can expand and develop," Brown said in the statement.