Tina Brown to Leave Daily Beast to Focus on Conferences

Tina Brown, one of the magazine industry’s most well-known editors and founder of The Daily Beast, announced Wednesday that she is leaving the Web site to start her own conference company.

Her departure ends a partnership with her financial backer, Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, that began in 2008.

Ms. Brown said she would start Tina Brown Live Media, which will focus on building up the Women in the World conferences she has been organizing and running for several years. At a meeting with the Daily Beast staff Wednesday, Ms. Brown said that 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,'’ Ms. Brown said in a statement.

An executive with direct knowledge of the negotiations said Ms. Brown’s split from Mr. Diller was friendly, and that she had been saying for more than a month that she did not want to continue in such a stressful position into the new year.

News of Ms. Brown’s departure was first reported by the Web site BuzzFeed.

Ms. Brown and Mr. Diller came together in 2008 to launch The Daily Beast. But their relationship was put to the test in 2010 when Ms. Brown persuaded Mr. Diller to help support the storied but struggling Newsweek magazine and merge it with The Daily Beast. Even Ms. Brown’s best efforts to save Newsweek were soured by the struggling market for newsmagazines, and the magazine lost millions of dollars.

Mr. Diller complained publicly for months about his frustrations with Newsweek. Late in 2012, Ms. Brown announced that Newsweek would cease publishing a print edition. In May, Ms. Brown confirmed that the magazine was up for sale, and in early August Newsweek was sold to the digital news company International Business Times.

The news of Ms. Brown’s coming departure attracted rapid-fire attention on Twitter from the myriad people who follow the New York media world and have followed her over the past few decades as editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Talk magazine. Within minutes of its report, BuzzFeed posted on Twitter a photograph of Ms. Brown sitting alone in a Chelsea restaurant, reporting that she was “yelling into the phone.”

The photograph drew 53 retweets and more than a dozen comments mixed with sadness and schadenfreude. They ranged from “I don’t know what to say! I feel bad for her!” to “I seriously LOL’d at that photo and could imagine her screeching in my head.”

Ms. Brown’s challenges with running Newsweek presented more challenges for Mr. Diller, who had to decide whether to renegotiate her contract by year’s end.

It appears that Ms. Brown will continue to have some ties with The Daily Beast and IAC even in her conference business. She has been hosting the Women in the World conferences for the last three years along with Mr. Diller’s wife, Diane von Furstenberg, and Meryl Streep. She is taking her events group, which is headed by Kathy O’Hearn, from The Daily Beast to help her with her conferences.

In a statement issued by Ms. Brown, she said The Daily Beast will remain a media partner for the April 2014 conference.