What We Can't Learn From The Daily's Demise

I come to neither praise nor bury The Daily, News Corp's iPad-only news app experiment that will end with a whimper in two weeks. But let's be clear on what went wrong — and what didn't.

As Wired's business editor at the time The Daily was announced I decided to cover it as a big event — the coming out party literally was a big event for News Corp, which threw a press conference that seemed to try too hard anoint it as a golden child from inception. When you use phrases like "digital renaissance” and assert that "We believe The Daily will be the model for the way stories are told and consumed,” you are setting yourself up for quite a fall.

My own initial impression, for a formal Wired review, was that The Daily was "very good" — 7/10. I admired the "cover flow" approach to displaying content and likened the publication to a "re-imagined digital magazine that is updated every day."

I praised the content: "The Daily looks like it may be onto something editorially, even if the economics are a challenge." But I also hedged: "Content will make or break this app, and it’s too early to judge the quality of The Daily‘s journalism — though nothing we read in the inaugural edition disqualifies it."

That assessment changed quickly for me.

For the few weeks I subscribed to The Daily I grew increasingly annoyed at the extent to which I was reading wire service copy. I'm sure I exaggerate but it seemed nearly every headline that attracted me wasn't a home-grown article.  Many of the enterprise, magazine-like articles seemed somewhat sensational, or trite. And it didn't even update daily, after all.

This made no sense to me. In other words, I couldn't find any reason to turn to The Daily as a news brand — and that has to be the absolute baseline requirement for a publication.

The explosion of news sources and circulation on the internet has diluted the value of most news brands. Twitter and Google News are entry points for many readers, not the bookmared home pages of favorite news sites. Even if 50-60% of traffic goes directly to a news site's home page that means there is a huge number of people who visit that site comes via individual news stories — What Adrienne LaFrance called "the side door" in an August post at the Nieman Journalism Lab (which I found in a Google search, since I don't have the site bookmarked …)

It's easy to criticize The Daily for having no meaningful web presence. The web is a reliable, attractive "open-source" repository for links. But in the age of the app it isn't the place everyone begins an Internet adventure anymore. It's also easy to blame The Daily's iPad-only conceit as a gimmick — why not be on many platforms, but design for the iPad? That would have been fabulous experiment since print magazines are, with mixed success, approching the new paradigm from the opposite direction, by trying to squeeze beefy offline franchises into slim digital attire.

In retrospect I think we will have learned little to nothing about the viability of a tablet-oriented news publication base on The Daily's 22-month life. 

But don't blame the platform: Mobile is king — right along there with content — and tablets are the king of mobile. Don't blame the concept: Getting your head around the unique contours and opportunities of the tablet footprint is a very worthy pursuit. Someone will crack that code, it will seem obvious in retrospect and we'll all be writing "This changes everything!' articles soon enough.

In the end, it came down to the basics. The Daily executed poorly and probably wouldn't have lived even as long as it did as a web site or (heaven forbid) a print publication. This is a textbook example of blaming the message — not the messenger.