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Daily Beast drops Howard Kurtz

The Daily Beast is dropping Howard Kurtz, the veteran media critic who made headlines this week for his erroneous report about NBA star Jason Collins.

“The Daily Beast and Howard Kurtz have parted company," Tina Brown, the site's editor in chief, said in a statement sent to POLITICO.

The decision comes after Kurtz published a blog post that falsely asserted that Collins, who announced he was gay in an article for Sports Illustrated, had neglected to mention his previous engagement to a woman. In fact, Collins mentioned that engagement in the article and in a subsequent interview with ABC News. The Daily Beast retracted that post on Thursday morning.

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But sources at The Daily Beast also tell POLITICO that Kurtz was dropped in part because he had been dedicating much of his time to other ventures, including The Daily Download, a media criticism site. Kurtz also hosts a weekend media criticism show on CNN called "Reliable Sources."

In her statement, Brown touted the Daily Beast's stable of columnists: "Under the direction of our newly named political director John Avlon we have added new momentum and authority to our Washington bureau with columnists such as Jon Favreau, Joshua Dubois and Stuart Stevens joining our outstanding DC team of Eleanor Clift, Daniel Klaidman, Michael Tomasky, Eli Lake, David Frum and Michelle Cottle — giving us one of the best politics teams in the business which was instrumental in this week’s Webby win for Best News site," she wrote.

UPDATE (4:02 p.m.): Kurtz tweets:

I've enjoyed my time at the Daily Beast but as we began to move in different directions, both sides agreed it was best to part company. — HowardKurtz (@HowardKurtz) May 2, 2013

This was in the works for some time, but want to wish all my colleagues continued success with a terrific website. — HowardKurtz (@HowardKurtz) May 2, 2013

This post has been updated.

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