Murdoch in 2009. (via Flickr Creative Commons: World Economic Forum)
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. said Monday that The Daily, its iPad-only “newspaper,” will shut down December 15. While Murdoch is facing financial turmoil with most of his print publications, The Daily served as an experiment of how newspapers could respond to their technological armageddon. The Daily launched in February 2011 and fired a third of its staff in July, according to the Columbia Journalism Review.
Marco Arment pointed out that The Daily’s staff size was unsustainable and its content not up to par with things The New Yorker or The Atlantic published. “There’s no room in today’s market for publications like The Daily,” he said, “and their heyday ended long before the iPad launched.”
Another CJR piece said the fact that viewers had to download the whole publication each issue made The Daily look impractical next to simpler mediums. The piece also looks at numerous ways the iPad provides less than an ideal format for reading stories.
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