ViaNYMag
With The Daily, Murdoch is doing something rare in his long career: building a media property from the ground up rather than reinventing an existing paper, as he did with the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. He’s using the opportunity to try to craft a major new editorial voice for the marketplace. In stark contrast to those of Murdoch’s existing American papers, The Daily’s politics will be centrist and pragmatic—Bloobergian, if you prefer—according to people close to the project. It’s a worldview embodied by its editor, Jesse Angelo, say people close to him. “He’s a freethinker, not locked in a dogma,” one source says. The opinion section will feature a range of both conservative and liberal pundits, and there are plans to wage “campaigns” on issues like immigration, education reform, and climate change. To oversee op-ed, The Daily has hired Elisabeth Eaves, a 39-year-old former Forbes editor and columnist who wrote a well-received book about stripping, which she spent some time doing. (Also, Eaves is Canadian, which means she was basically born reasonable.) The star columnist hire so far is Reihan Salam, who brings a telling pedigree. A co-author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, the affable 30-year-old is the liberal commentariat’s favorite young conservative pundit and friendly with the New Republic set. The Daily is reportedly in talks with ascendant left-leaning writers who would serve as his counterpart.
