News Corp's iPad newspaper 'The Daily' shutting down Dec. 15

http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/12/03/news-corps-ipad-newspaper-the-daily-shutting-down-dec-15

by Thibaut • 14 years ago

23 22 14 years ago

coob• 14 years ago

Why did The Daily fail? I'm putting it down to it having no unique character and thus suffering a blandness of writing. That, combined with terrible UX.

rcush• 14 years ago

I actually don't think the UX was that bad. Certainly not bad enough to be considered a major factor in the failure of the venture. My own take would be that the costs were too high, the device limitations were off-putting, iPad-only to start was a mistake, and the biggest factor was the daily nature of The Daily. It is nonsensical to have a daily news publication online where the old limitations of printing and distribution no longer exist.

danso2• 14 years ago

Some more context: http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/mobile-media/19...

The Daily's publisher claims to have had 100,000 paying subscribers (not clear if these are the 99-cent/week ones or the $40/yr)...assuming 100K of the latter, that's $4M in annual revenue.

Past reports said that the startup costs were $30 million and that annual costs were projected to be $26M (Murdoch claimed that operating costs would be "less than half a million dollars a week")

http://www.businessinsider.com/murdoch-the-daily-will-cost-5...

I'm not glad it failed (for the sake of people who had jobs), but I'm glad it didn't become the flagship of future media efforts...which it seemed it might be because News Corp could afford to operate it at a loss for years. Besides the whole iPad-only thing, it was obvious that it was way too hard to maintain, with each page/feature seeming like a bespoke-app built from scratch...never to be seen again after the day was over. That's no feasible model for any content-provider.

Best of luck to the staffers who worked there, they did pick up some pretty good talent. But talent alone won't bring enough subscribers (the NYT also announced buyouts today)

* Here's an example of the bespoke-kind of features that the Daily tried to do...don't know if they actually tried this out, but the costs to produce this on even a weekly basis would be non-trivial:

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/mobile-media/11...

> “People familiar with the Daily tell me plans for future editions of the app include a gee-whiz feature that will allow correspondents to offer readers a 360-degree view of whatever they’re talking about.”

digitalengineer2• 14 years ago

Part of the reason might be Apple's Newsstand. "For a lot of people Newsstand is a place where apps go to be forgotten." http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/06/25/flipboard-nyt

eddieroger• 14 years ago

I think Gruber is wrong here. Blaming the channel is silly, since if the Times' content was good enough, he'd go to it and move Newsstand back to the front page. I don't necessarily agree with Apple in locking all apps like this to Newsstand, but for the ones I want to read, I open it.

Frankly, I like it. It makes sense to me to group all of those apps together, and if Apple didn't force me in to it, I'd have done it anyway. But that's just my perspective.

glenra• 14 years ago

I have a "News" folder on my front page with 10 items in it (including CNN and AP Mobile and Wall Street Journal and Zineo and a few bookreader apps...and then I have a "Newsstand" folder with ONE item in it, the New York Times app. I can't put the Newsstand or the New York Times app into the News folder, even though it's got a couple slots free. I can't take NYT out of the Newsstand even though it's a folder of one item. How is this helpful? What was wrong with the prior system, when NYT could be in my News folder with all the other news apps?

digitalengineer2• 14 years ago

A bit more from Gruber (after some insights from marco from Instapaper). Gruber: " They never seemed to treat software engineering and design as a primary function of the publication. They were competing as much against Flipboard as they were The New York Times, but didn’t seem to realize it."

Marco: "The Daily failed because what they chose to make, with its huge staffing costs, required far more than their 100,000 subscribers to be financially sustainable. And it didn’t attract more subscribers because what they chose to make was, itself, deeply flawed."

colkassad2• 14 years ago

The hyperlink has dealt a mortal wound to the newspaper industry, and social media will end up dealing the coup de grace. Old media would love to still have the ability to consolidate news into a nice pre-packaged product that they can sell, but the web has destroyed the ability for that to happen. Why have a Daily app when you can have Twitter or even RSS deliver the news? It's hard to pay for something that is just lying around everywhere.

sami36• 14 years ago

Rest assured, they have a business model in place : Selection Bias, as evidenced by the rise of FoxNews, MSNBC & Glenn Beck's the blaze. With facts & news now getting commoditized, "opinion" & "Analysis" are proving to be lucrative cash cows. pay me X $ & I'll package & interpret the news for you in a digestible way that aligns with your values, biases & preconceptions.

colkassad2• 14 years ago

Yes, but it costs me nothing to go to foxnews.com or dailykos. I think something like the Daily would appeal to someone like my father who still places a lot of value in spending $80/month watching news and "analysis", but I think it will be hard for the industry to find a larger audience as time goes by.

untog3• 14 years ago

Thing is, good news isn't just "lying around everywhere". It takes a lot of work to make it. I will openly admit to bias because I work for a newspaper, but I dread the day when the only news outlets we have left are opinionated, biased blogs. No-one in the field actually gathering news, just an endless stream of people interpreting events they haven't witnessed in countries they've never been to.

TillE• 14 years ago

Some of the best investigative journalism I've seen has come from "bloggers" who can make a few phone calls.

Traditional media is not doing a good job of this. They can stick a reporter out in a hurricane or a war zone or the White House briefing room, but how often does that produce useful data? So often we get nothing but shallow, misleading information, or a dutiful transcription of statements from "both sides".

Professional journalism will survive, but hopefully it won't look the same.

notatoad• 14 years ago

the amount of good news coming out of newspapers is pretty minimal.

This sort of snobbery towards blogs one of the big reasons that newspapers are failing so badly these days. The medium is unimportant, the content is what matters. Just because it's printed on newsprint, doesn't make your content good. Just because it's on a blog, doesn't mean the content is bad.

wildranter• 14 years ago

"Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term." — News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch

Translation: we're shutting it down because we couldn't find anyone with less than two brain cells to like and pay for our crappy content.

waynehaworth• 14 years ago

History will repeat itself. The story of these publishers trying to claim some significant web space reminds me of the internet gold rush of the 90s.

We had all these flashy sites springing up trying to leverage this new web technology in wrong way, by adding all sorts of whiz-bang most was unnecessary. We had an incorrect (immature?) view as to what this new technology should be used for.

Just because we have iPads and other tablets with the potential to pump out lots of flash-bang, does not mean we need to build our apps submerged with these features. iPads (and the net in general) give us many great advantages over print media not related to putting extra pixels on screen, many of which are beginning to be taken advantage of.

Marco Arment recently launched his iOS magazine (http://www.marco.org/2012/10/11/the-magazine) which strips bare many of the hassles involved with paper based publishing and delivers an excellent reader experience while cutting out all the crap which publishers seem to believe they need to inject into their online models.

I could be wrong, but if The Daily had concentrated on putting out excellent content, quickly, with a minimal interface with excellent sharing options, maybe things would have been different? Surely they could have avoided spending much of the $30 million on start-up costs.

Rather than listening to the siren singing us to shipwreck upon the glittery rocks of "Web 2.0", we should be using this new technology to help get better content to readers more often. Fuck the rest.

nglevin• 14 years ago

> I could be wrong, but if The Daily had concentrated on putting out excellent content, quickly, with a minimal interface with excellent sharing options, maybe things would have been different?

The Daily was an effort to compete with the likes of TMZ and USA Today. Light on reading, heavy on "entertainment." And kept snugly within the bounds of a paywall.

Marco's magazine might work for something like IEEE or ACM, but I can't imagine News Corporation buying into it. They really, really did not want to let go of the pretty pictures and panoramas. :)

News Corp's iPad newspaper 'The Daily' shutting down Dec. 15

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