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News Corp. Considering Canceling 'The Daily'?

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Apr 12, 2001
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Back in February 2011, Apple executive Eddy Cue was on hand for the launch of The Daily, a new tablet-focused news publication from News Corp. that premiered on the iPad.

Availability of The Daily has since expanded to both Android tablets and the iPhone, but questions about the publication's viability have remained as revenues remain well below the tens of millions of dollars being pumped into it.

In a larger article from The New York Observer (via TUAW) addressing the demise of News Corp.'s Newscore newswire service, sources suggest that The Daily may also be on thin ice.
In addition, there are internal rumors that The Daily has been put "on watch." According to a source the status of the groundbreaking iPad tabloid--which loses $30 million a year--will be reassessed after the November 6 election.
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Pricing for the iPad version of The Daily is currently set at $0.99 per week or $39.99 per year via In App Subscription, with the iPhone version being offered at roughly half-price on monthly and yearly subscriptions.

Article Link: News Corp. Considering Canceling 'The Daily'?
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2012/07/12/news-corp-considering-canceling-the-daily/
I had a subscription for about 5 weeks or so and just canceled it last week.

I found the app to be very slow and laggy. It needed to download new articles every time I opened it, which caused more waiting. And I found there weren't really that many articles that interested me. It was kind of a novel thing, but not at all necessary. I found myself forcing myself to read it every day, and look through the articles just to convince myself that it was worth it. Many of the articles I had already seen from free sources.

Free news aggregator is the way to go. Personally I like zite and pulse.
 
That reminds me, I need to cancel my sub. Cool concept but damn is the app laggy, not a very good user experience. I was always waiting for them to fix it and they never did.
 
I thought the app worked fine...

But the content was horrible. I cancelled my subscription after their "Hillary drinks a lot" article. That was horrible.

They found pictures of her drinking alcohol over the course of a few years and made it look like she was an alcoholic. No matter what your political leanings, that was BS "journalism".
 
I subscribed to the Daily for a while. It was terrible on iPad 1, but on 2 or 3 it ran fine, other than having to wait to download when you opened it.

The problem was that I already had seen pretty much all the news they covered from Twitter or RSS. Some editorials were cool, but not worth the admission price to me.
 
It's a real shame because the formatting and presentating of the content was absolutely beautiful. Had the content BEING presented not been so trashy, it definitely would've been worth the price tag to me.

For that reason, i really hope that this isn't seen as some bellweather for how journalism formatted for mobile devices isn't workable. It definitely is. IF what you're doing is actually journalism, and not the junk that murdoch likes to out out there as "news."

NYTimes has the other problem: good content, lackluster presentation and formatting.
 
Trik said:
But the content was horrible. I cancelled my subscription after their "Hillary drinks a lot" article. That was horrible.

They found pictures of her drinking alcohol over the course of a few years and made it look like she was an alcoholic. No matter what your political leanings, that was BS "journalism".
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I couldn't agree more. The articles they provided, frankly, were insulting to my intelligence. It was like a glorified issue of Star Magazine. Shameful.
 
I remain subscribed to the daily, even though I rarely use it. The content seems mentally vacuous, but some of the articles, and the formatting is always great. I will be sad to lose the only thing in my newsstand.
 
WSJ app rules in comparison

I wonder why the user experience wasn't better considering they also developed the Wall Street Journal app and I've never had issues with it.
 
Is there no hope for new paper publications?

It was neat to play with but not worth the price.

But what is these days when everything is free?
 
It's the same stories I see elsewhere on the net for free, why would I pay for them?
 
Daily Content

I don't entirely get the comments on content. The news articles are no different than others on various news sites. Yes, it may have a more conservative bent but that doesn't make it trashy. And yes, like every other content provider, they have too many fluff articles. I could do without the Gossip section myself and wish the sports section is better. However the overall news section reports on the news.

I think the problem is that we've all been conditioned to get something for free or next to free. We complain if we need to pay $40 a year for content and complain if an app has too much advertising. Perhaps dropping the fee to $10 a year would result in more sales, but I suspect they've done their research and that's not likely.

I hope the Daily lives. Perhaps they can beef up the content a bit and tweak the pricing and remain profitable. The delivery of the content is the best I've seen.
 
bdhokie said:
I don't entirely get the comments on content. The news articles are no different than others on various news sites. Yes, it may have a more conservative bent but that doesn't make it trashy. And yes, like every other content provider, they have too many fluff articles. I could do without the Gossip section myself and wish the sports section is better. However the overall news section reports on the news.

I think the problem is that we've all been conditioned to get something for free or next to free. We complain if we need to pay $40 a year for content and complain if an app has too much advertising. Perhaps dropping the fee to $10 a year would result in more sales, but I suspect they've done their research and that's not likely.

I hope the Daily lives. Perhaps they can beef up the content a bit and tweak the pricing and remain profitable. The delivery of the content is the best I've seen.
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As mentioned above, if you want to pay any amount of money to subscribe to a publication that can cobble together 7-8 photos of someone over the course of years and accuse them of having a drinking problem, then that's your business. I don't hand someone money to lie to me.
 
Trik said:
But the content was horrible. I cancelled my subscription after their "Hillary drinks a lot" article. That was horrible.

They found pictures of her drinking alcohol over the course of a few years and made it look like she was an alcoholic. No matter what your political leanings, that was BS "journalism".
Click to expand...

Indeed.
 
Too bad... Unfortunately, having other apps available for free such as USA Today, Reuters News Pro, BBC, CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News and more to choose from would definitely make it difficult for a paid subscription news service to survive.
Maybe they need to modify their revenue source to be Ad-based instead, if it does make sense to them.
 
I don't think they ever really presented the journalistic intent of 'The Daily', if so I don't remember it. From what I recall they focused on how spiffy it was as an iPad app.

Regardless of your political leanings and what you think about News Corp, the whole thing seems technically very spiffy but muddled content-wise. It's like advertising your new book by talking about how great the reading experience is, without really talking about the book itself.

It was never presented well enough to me to make me interested in the magazine itself, to want to learn more about it. And there's already a lot of great ways to get news on an iPad.
 
Lipstick on a pig

What can one say. Write trash and lies and charge a fee? I can get it for free on my local Fox station.
 
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