WebNewser reports one of Diane Sawyer‘s producers has left ABC and is joining DailyBeast.com/Newsweek. And she’s not the first tvnewser to join the Tina Brown publication.

Some network anchors get chauffeured around the city in company-provided town cars.

Not ABC “This Week” anchor Christiane Amanpour.

Amanpour, along with a bevy of powerful women in the media–including Tina Brown and Barbara Walters–toasted Arianna Huffington at midtown media hotspot Michael’s yesterday.

As Amanpour was leaving, Huffington tweeted a picture of her mode of transport:

“After the lunch, @camanpour took off on her bicycle!”

So how does Amanpour roll? Find out after the jump.

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Last night TVNewser ventured to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where Newsweek/Daily Beast editor Tina Brown hosted a party for CNN’s new 9 PM host, Piers Morgan.

In welcoming the guests, Morgan shared a remarkable (if it’s true) story about an encounter he had with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly at a recent New York Knicks game.

Morgan and O’Reilly were in the VIP suite, and having never met the FNC host, Morgan naturally wanted to say hello.

“Obvisouly I marched up, expecting him to shower me with praise about this glorious resurrection of CNN, and he comes up to me and goes, ‘ah, yea, I know you,’” Morgan recalled.

“So I shuffled off meekly,” Morgan said. “Not only is he #1 but he is intimidating, he sort of shooed me away.”

It was Morgan, however, who would get the last laugh a few minutes later, when O’Reilly returned with his teenage daughter:

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Washington Post media reporter and host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” Howard Kurtz is joining The Daily Beast. He will become Washington bureau chief for the IAC-backed website, which was founded by Tina Brown.

Kurtz will continue to host his CNN program.

“I’ve wanted to work with Tina Brown forever—well, for a long time—and I’m incredibly impressed by the energy and creativity of The Daily Beast staff,” said Kurtz in a statement. “After a lifetime in newspapers, I’m ready for the challenge of fast-paced online journalism.”

Earlier this week the site announced it had hired David Kirkpatrick as technology columnist, and has also poached some big name reporters from outlets like the Wall Street Journal and New York Post.

The Daily’s Beast’s Tina Brown has gathered up some of the most influential women in the world this weekend for an event in New York with many of the discussions moderated by some of the most influential women in TV News. Barbara, Katie, and Diane to name just a few.

Barbara Walters challenges former Secy. of State Madeleine Albright.

Katie Couric interviews Queen Rania of Jordan.

Here’s The Beast’s coverage so far. More photos after the jump…

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Where can you find Christiane Amanpour, Lesley Stahl, Katie Couric, Barbara Walters, Juju Chang, Mika Brzezinski, Diane Sawyer and Campbell Brown all in one place?

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Barbara Walters was among the guests the other night at New York’s Kouros Gallery for Mika Brzezinski‘s new book “All Things At Once.”

Brzezinski’s book is dedicated to her mother, the sculptor Emilie Brzezinski.

The event was co-hosted by Miles Nadal, Chairman of MDC Partners and The Daily Beast’s Tina Brown. Other newsers in attendance: Mika’s morning partner, Joe Scarborough. Their boss, MSNBC president Phil Griffin, NBCU CEO Jeff Zucker, CNN’s Alina Cho, Gayle King, Tom Brokaw and The New York Times‘ Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Writer, journalist, and former editor of the Sunday Times, Sir Harold Evans lauds CNN in an article for the Daily Beast, the site run by his wife Tina Brown: “On the [Massachusetts] election and on Haiti, I’d say CNN has come into its own, once again justifying its slogan ‘The Worldwide Leader in News’ and founder Ted Turner’s faith in his innovation.”

This weekend on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” host Howard Kurtz talked with The Daily Beast’s Tina Brown, former CBS Evening News EP Rome Hartman, and the Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik about last week’s announcement from ABC that Charlie Gibson would be stepping down from “World News” and that Diane Sawyer would be filling the anchor position. The panel discussed Gibson’s tenure, Sawyer’s qualifications, and women in the evening news chair.

Embedded video from CNN Video

Today at the Paley Center for Media, the IFC Media Project hosted a panel on how national and international press coverage differs.

Katty Kay of the BBC described the European media’s campaign coverage. “Let’s not pretend that 99.9% of Europe wanted Obama to be president,” she said. “There was definitely a sense that the European media was in the tank for Obama.”

Al-Jazeera English host Josh Rushing is not a fan of U.S. TV news. “Television, I think, absolutely sucks here,” he said. “We exist in our own media island.”

Former Bush administration press secretary Ari Fleischer and DailyBeast.com founder Tina Brown both described the conflict inherent in TV news. “It’s a dramatic medium…It’s totally about conflict,” said Brown, while Fleischer thought “the first and worst bias is conflict.”

Before the panel we talked to Fleischer about which members of the White House press corps are doing a good job, the current cable news landscape and how he’d grade his successor Robert Gibbs 100 days in:



Click continued to see a clip of the first episode, about Al-Jazeera English…

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