

News Corp's iPad newspaper 'The Daily' shutting down Dec. 15 - Thibaut
http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/12/03/news-corps-ipad-newspaper-the-daily-shutting-down-dec-15

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waynehaworth
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
> 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. :)

------
colkassad
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.

~~~
untog
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
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.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
It's now a pet peeve of mine to see a reporter in a hurricane/warzone/crime
scene telling you something banal they could have told you from a studio. The
wasted time and effort for fake "authenticity" totally jumps out at me now.

~~~
pcl
Regarding the clichéd reporter yelling into a camera by a pier while the surf
churns in the background, that's fair enough.

But reporting from war zones and crime scenes and whatnot is something
altogether different. If we don't have reporters in those situations, who
should we believe? The military? The police? Should we expect bloggers to fill
in the gap by jetting off to Syria? Should we expect bloggers to attend state
government proceedings day after day, or should we expect our representatives
to honestly and completely disclose what they discuss when none of us are
present, or to properly notify us ahead of time before anything "interesting"
is discussed?

Clearly, I'd rather see professional journalism in those roles. Bloggers and
social media have important roles in the news industry as well, but I'm
concerned by the thought of a future without professional journalism.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
If recording what happens matters then cheap recording devices in the hands of
locals or volunteers should suffice. I'm not seeing how live satellite
broadcasts of a talking head from the roof of a 5 star hotel in a warzone or a
suburban street as bodies are dug up adds anything but verisimilitude to
whatever soundbites theyre spouting.

~~~
untog
You're talking about very different things, though. Not every journalist is a
TV, camera-facing talking head. Are you really suggesting that the most
journalists ever contribute is the 45 second segments on the evening news?

What about the written reports? The field journalists in Gaza, talking to the
groups on the ground and giving first-hand accounts of the violence? That's
important. Relying on cheap recording devices in the hands of locals is a
terrible idea- they are the very people least likely to be impartial. To use
the Gaza example, there would be thousands of recordings of Israeli strikes,
but very few of missiles being launched the other way because no-one would
want to record it. We'd end up with entirely biased coverage.

Who would be writing something like this:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/world/middleeast/israel-
ga...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-
conflict.html)

?

------
coob
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
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.

------
danso
Some more context: [http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/mobile-
media/19...](http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/mobile-
media/196885/2-major-lessons-from-the-demise-of-the-daily/)

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...](http://www.businessinsider.com/murdoch-the-daily-will-
cost-56-million-to-run-in-year-one-2011-2)

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...](http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/mobile-
media/116401/the-daily-to-include-3d-video-features/)

> _“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.”_

------
wildranter
"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.

------
digitalengineer
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
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
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?

