Tina Brown, the newest member in the aggregation gang, spoke at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism last week. She said that her vision for The Daily Beast was to create a site that would be like “a smart friend to tell you what to read every morning that’s completely clear, that has a great sort of eye for what the story is, and can ignore all the noise you don’t need.”

Brown, who edited Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, among other pubs, before launching the Beast, also weighed in on the micropayment model, saying that the approach would kill off journalism because the most popular pieces would not be works of serious reporting, leading few editors to say, “Let’s do more of the thing that loses money.”

The complete lecture is available here.