Daily Beast's Brown, Diller visits Bloomberg BusinessWeek

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

There was quite a high-powered media get-together Wednesday at the offices of Bloomberg Businessweek.

Daily Beast editor Tina Brown and consultant Ciro Scotti — previously the managing editor of Bloomberg Businessweek — paid a visit to the magazine’s editor in chief, Josh Tyrangiel, and Bloomberg L.P. chief content officer Norm Pearlstine.

Tagging along was media mogul Barry Diller, whose IAC owns Daily Beast; Daily Beast managing editor Edward Felsenthal, formerly of The Wall Street Journal; and Paul Bascobert, the president of Bloomberg Businessweek.

Daily Beast is merging with Newsweek, and while the meeting might lead to speculation that the business magazine would provide content to Daily Beast/Newsweek, our sources tell us that the visit to 731 Lexington Ave. had another purpose.

Brown and Scotti were apparently there simply to check out the office layout, presumably to get ideas for their new offices. Scotti, according to Lucia Moses of Mediaweek, is doing consulting work for the Daily Beast on logistics.

“It was so public it was weird,” said one Bloomberg Businessweek staffer. “Ostensibly, we had a big transition and they are having one, but why the heck would Barry Diller come to a meeting where people were going to pass along tips on a transition?”

Moving into new digs is something that the business weekly recently experienced.

Bloomberg Businessweek moved out of the McGraw-Hill building at 1221 Avenue of the Americas earlier this year and into the Bloomberg office, where one Businessweek staffer claims that one of the fish tanks has a fish with a human face.