NY Post: Newsweek/Daily Beast Merger Is Weeks Away

Newsweek owner Sidney Harman told New York Post's Keith J. Kelly that the long-awaited merger of the struggling news magazine and the Daily Beast will finally happen in mid-January.

Kelly writes this morning:

There was no word from Barry Diller, chairman of the InterActiveCorp/IAC side of the new joint venture, which owns the Daily Beast.

Most observers blame legal and paperwork delays, combined with the usual holiday slowdown rather than any serious snags that could derail the deal reached in early November.

That means Tina Brown, the Daily Beast editor-in-chief and former editor of The New Yorker and the much-hyped failure Talk Magazine, will have longer to wait before she can put her stamp on the newsweekly when she takes over the combined operations.

In the meantime, interim co-editors Dan Klaidman and Nisid Hajari have agreed to stick around until at least the end of January -- and possibly longer.

They have been running the magazine since Jon Meacham left in late August.