News Corp's iPad newspaper 'The Daily' shutting down Dec. 15
appleinsider.com
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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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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...
?
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.
However, a lot of self-produced writing out there seems to lean towards being heavily opinionated, with no attempt at objectivity or journalistic integrity. This is what concerns me- not the presentation method. It just so happens that blogging is the most popular medium for this kind of output.
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.”
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.
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.
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."