News Corp to close down The Daily
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The Daily, the much publicized first iPad only newspaper created by Ruport Murdock, is going to shut down just shy of two years. All Things D reports that the publication is being shuttered because it “could not find a large enough audience quickly enough” to make the endeavor sustainable long term. Last year it was reported that it only had 120,000 subscribers at a time when it needed 500,000.
The Daily launched in February 2011 with a great deal of fanfare and a blessing from Apple, which worked closely with News Corp. to get the paper off the ground. But The Daily never clicked, and struggled to attract subscribers.
The app was initially hampered by technical problems, but The Daily’s key issue was a conceptual one. While the app boasted lots of digital bells and whistles, in the end it was very much a general interest newspaper that seemed to be geared toward people who didn’t really like newspapers. You can’t make that work no matter what kind of platform you use.
Here’s my initial review of The Daily. It was written during the initial technical problems mentioned above. After my trial was over, I didn’t think the content was deep or original enough to warrant the subscription (which I felt was quite reasonable). I had high hopes that the experiment would work to prove that the tablet was a viable platform for subscription content.
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