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.
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.
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")
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:
> “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.”
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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Um...somehow I don't think the cure for banal journalism is to have fewer reporters on the actual scene. And sometimes they say banal things because there is nothing else to day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're reading to much into my usage of the word 'blogs', and too little into my usage of the word 'opinionated'. Newspapers have blogs. They make great stuff. There are many great blogs out there that have nothing to do with newspapers and produce fantastic content.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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. :)
24 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 48.4 ms ] threadThe 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.”
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."
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.
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.
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. :)