I think it’s fair to say this news caught most people by surprise. Longtime Washington Post media reporter Howie Kurtz is leaving the paper to join Tina Brown‘s Daily Beast as the site’s Washington Bureau Chief.

The Daily Beast’s Shushannah Walshe is reporting that Sarah Palin and her team are making definitive steps toward a 2012 Presidential run.

Through Palin has resisted making concrete statements about her intentions, the opinions of those closest to her are a good indicator. Those involved in her crew, SarahPAC, are a loyal bunch and no one talks to the press without the approval of the boss. Her top aide Rebecca Mansour says, “She respects her team and her team respects her and we’ve learned that she knows what she’s doing.” A former 2008 staffer put it more bluntly, “she is attracted to people who are going to take a bullet for her because she really will ask you to one day.”

Though Jon Meacham stepped down as Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek this summer, his successor has not yet been named. Before leaving, however, he reportedly told Tom Ascheim, Newsweek‘s CEO, that veteran magazine editor Tina Brown might be the best woman for the job. Brown, of course, is currently running The Daily Beast—and she’s said that she has no intention of leaving that post.

But what if she didn’t have to?

Billionaire David Koch was not happy with Jane Mayer‘s recent profile of him in The New Yorker, which accused Koch and his brother Charles of secretly financing the Tea Party movement. He expressed his ire to Daily Beast writer Elaine Lafferty, who penned a lengthy defense of Koch that was posted last Friday. But as The New York Observer notes, Lafferty’s defense of Koch didn’t initially tell the whole story.

A few weeks back New Yorker scribe Jane Mayer penned a much-discussed piece about the nefarious backroom dealings of the billionaire Koch brothers. Suffice to say, the Kochs were not pleased with the article, perhaps had they just spoken to Mayer in the first place things might have been different.

Brian Ries at The Daily Beast has penned an interesting piece on the low level of discourse in the comments section of many political blogs and whether or not it’s representative of the nation’s current political discourse. Case in point: Ben Smith‘s Politico blog. (Did you all think I was talking about ours?)

Move over Katrina anniversary, rallies designed to honor restoration, and oval office speeches about wars kinda sorta ending. Enter Meghan McCain’s new book Dirty Sexy Politics which ironically includes plenty of tabloid-attention-getting material and television appearances by author Meghan McCain. Take for example the following pull quote about the Palin family.

Fox News reporter Carl Cameron sold out his own network to a DailyKos blogger. That’s what a Daily Beast contributor would have you believe. In a story posted yesterday a report claimed that Cameron said that FNC had organized the Tea Party and overreached in their influence over the Sherrod scandal. Mediaite exclusively spoke to Cameron, who explained that much of what was reported was taken out of context.

Meghan McCain has written some interesting and thought-provoking columns at The Daily Beast – holding wide-ranging opinions that we’d like to see on a This Week panel.

Today though, she went a different route. An interview with Jersey Shore phenom and, yes John McCain voter, Snooki.

Obama has done a lot to stay in good graces with the American youth population who helped to get him elected. He had Beyonce sing at his inauguration (so hip!), he put some extra cash in their pockets for their college bills. But according to The Daily Beast, the twentysomethings who followed his administration from the campaign trail to the White House are jumping ship.

The White House Press Corp. has been having a rough ride of late. The other week The Daily Beast published a long article about why they were (once again) irrelevant, and just this weekend President Obama forgot about them…literally.

When I first saw Lloyd Grove‘s version of the now-annual effort to autopsy the White House press corps, I rolled my eyes in agreement with Glynnis MacNicol.

Then, I noticed that not one of the 3 C-Spans, nor any other news outlet, carried yesterday’s briefing. Heh, neat coincidence. No biggie. The timing’s a little weird, but these things happen.

Still, before this gains any more traction, allow me to make the case for the press corps to the writer of next year’s “Press Corpse” piece, and anyone else who’s interested.

Israel does not always have the best reputation when it comes to reliable journalism but wow, a recent decision by the government to black out (literally) all news coverage of a certain story is taking it to a whole other level…and Shep Smith is appalled.

Why is everyone so determined to kill the White House Press Corps? Last year Ana Marie Cox wrote a much-passed-around op-ed calling for the dismissal of the group altogether. Now Lloyd Grove at the Daily Beast is taking aim wondering whether “the White House press corps teetering (possibly tweeting) on the brink of obsolescence?” But is it really?

Michael Jordan is back in the news, as new details are emerging regarding his fire-sale purchase of the Charlotte Bobcats, and the financial troubles faced by former owner Robert Johnson. This comes one day after a Vanity Fair piece shed light on his alleged bad influence on Tiger Woods.

Ashley Dupre may not be the only big winner of the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal. The madam that helped set the governor up with prostitutes for five years, Kristin Davis, is now running for the state’s top executive job herself as a right-leaning independent.

Perhaps in the future, in an over-perfected, suspense-less, Gattaca universe, men will come with LED displays on their foreheads that read: “I mean business” or “I’m deliberately wasting your time,” or, “Actually, I’m gay,” or “I’ll marry you, but we’ll loathe each other and I’ll leave you for a 20-year old when you’re 37.”

Last week, Vivian Schiller, CEO and President of NPR, offered the Daily Beast her opinion on the New York Times’ recently announced pay wall. Basically, she applauds their efforts and really isn’t sure whether or not it will work. But as the head of one of the largest donations-based media organizations in history, Schiller doesn’t really need to worry.

The New York Times lengthy, largely-positive Sunday profile of Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes has gotten a lot of attention from around the media (including here).

But the one major element that was negative – a quote from Rupert Murdoch son-in-law Matthew Freud – has been the focal point of two Daily Beast columns in the past three days. There may be a reason.

The Daily Beast’s Tunku Varadarajan quotes “a Wellesley graduate, a widely traveled, thirty-something, multilingual daughter of Indian immigrants who lives in that most redneck of territories…Union Square, in Manhattan” in his defense of the Tea Partiers. Defending and/or warning against the prevalence the Tea Partiers is apparently the latest media parlor game.

You will not, I think, be surprised to hear that Sarah Palin is selling a lot of books. Last week The Daily Beast reported that Palin had sold 300,000 copies of Going Rogue in the first day alone (that was last Tuesday, meaning we have officially completed one full week of Sarah Palin). And it only gets bigger.

As we approach the anniversary of the 2008 presidential election, many are looking back on President Obama‘s first year in office. But what if it never was? Today, The Daily Beast has the exclusive text of Sarah Palin‘s prepared speeches — win or lose — on that fateful night last November. And they’re as entertaining as one could’ve hoped.

John Batchelor at The Daily Beast shines a bit of a different light on the the White House’s new idiotic, short-sighted, condescending plan to take on Fox News because they think its coverage is undermining President Obama’s vision for the country.

Tina Brown has just posted her latest version of Hillary Clinton. Considering the Secretary of State is still answering the invisible question put forth by Brown in a column three months ago, she perhaps may want to consider checking in with Tina and company to find out what they have determined her latest iteration to be.

According to Newsweek no one in their “right mind” thinks newspapers will or should survive in their current state. Saving print is the equivalent of saving horse drawn carriages or steam engines. It’s time for newspapers to die, says the magazine that just overhauled its print version at great expense.