The Daily, the flagship magazine launched at a special event on February 2, 2011, is closing down on December 15, 2012, just shy of its second birthday. A bold attempt at embracing tablet-centric publishing with the support of Rupert Murdoch and Apple, News Corps announced the shut down as part of a large overall restructuring that will involve their news division keeping the name News Corps, their entertainment division splitting off under the name Fox Group, and Jesse Angelo, who was editor-in-chief of the Daily, will become published of the New York post. Here's what Murdoch had to say in the News Corps press release:
As part of a digital restructuring initiative, the company will cease standalone publication of The Daily iPad app on December 15, 2012, though the brand will live on in other channels. Technology and other assets from The Daily, including some staff, will be folded into The Post.
“From its launch, The Daily was a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation. 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. Therefore we will take the very best of what we have learned at The Daily and apply it to all our properties. Under the editorial leadership of Editor-in-Chief Col Allan and the business and digital leadership of Jesse, I know The New York Post will continue to grow and become stronger on the web, on mobile, and not least, the paper itself. I want to thank all of the journalists, digital and business professionals for the hard work they put into The Daily.”
News Corps also says some technology, staff, and other assets will get folded into the New York Post.
The Daily has been an interesting ride. Traditional publishers have been reticent to do digital-first publications in the past, and it was great to see News Corps try to blaze a trail into that new frontier. However, they did it in a very traditional way, and their analog strategies and business models never seemed to mesh with the realities of digital content gathering and distribution.
It doesn't feel like a great news magazine can't be made exclusively for tablets, it feels like News Corps realized their weren't making the right one, the right way.
Marco Arment's The Magazine does a great job re-inventing short-form articles for mobile in general, and Newsstand in specific. Perhaps it will likewise take a new person or organization to figure out news-gathering and reporting.
Source: News Corps
Reader comments
The Daily going dark: News Corp stopping the digital presses on December 15
"It doesn't feel like a great news magazine can't be made exclusively for tablets, it feels like News Corps realized their weren't making the right one, the right way."
I know this is only a blog but a little proofreading for spelling, grammar, and run on sentences might add a little credibility.
They couldn't get a large user base because the app suffered ridiculous performance issues and other dumb bugs throughout its existence.
It's too bad, really, I actually kind of liked The Daily, despite the poor engineering.
Re: "It doesn't feel like a great news magazine can't be made exclusively for tablets, it feels like News Corps realized their weren't making the right one, the right way."
Disagree. If News Corp could have reworked The Daily to increase their subscriber base, they would have. They didn't. Either because they didn't understand what it would have taken or because they refused to.
Never read The Daily, so I can't comment on its content. But after reading many reviews, it seemed like the UI was much more bizarre than other Newsstand apps. Exactly the opposite of what magazine subscribers are used to. Front cover followed by a table of contents followed by pages of text & photos. There shouldn't be any need to read a manual on how to "operate" a Newsstand app. It should "just work" more or less like a physical magazine.
"More or less" because it's OK these days to incorporate a few web-page-like features. Tapping a topic in the table of contents should magically link you to the story. Fine. But once you're in a story, it should require no learning curve. The only thing the user should have to figure out is whether to swipe left/right to change pages like in a physical magazine, or to swipe up/down to scroll through content like on a web page. (Plus or minus the odd photo gallery or ad, etc.)
But no, The Daily is a classic example of "Designers Gone Wild." On the other hand, The Magazine is clean, straightforward, and pure. (Now, if only they had a little more content...)
Too bad, was not that bad. Just turned off subcription, and deleted. I did read it, but to be honest, I liked Zite better for quick reading.
This is really a shame. I loved the daily. Yes it suffered some glitches but every app does, even Apple's apps.