The Daily

» see thedaily.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the daily's peak years overlap with the period i had a working ipad in the house, but i never subscribed. it was an english-language us news app from rupert murdoch's news corp. anyway, the news i wanted was already coming from a tab in a browser, not from an app that wanted 99 cents a week.

the launch was a big event in february 2011 at the guggenheim. apple announced its new ios subscription tools at the same event, since the daily was the showcase product for them. news corp supplied the bet that a newspaper made for a touchscreen could find an audience large enough to pay for a newsroom of about a hundred people. that bet ran for 22 months. the math never worked.

i read about the launch in a tech blog the same week. it sounded like the future, also like a stretch, somehow at the same time. by the end of 2012 it was a closed app icon on a small number of ipads. then a refund email.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

the daily was a newspaper that only existed inside one app on one device family. you couldnt link to a daily article from a tweet. you couldnt read it on a laptop. news corp seemed to think this was a feature rather than a problem. the editors built each issue overnight, the way a print paper is built, then pushed it to subscribers in the morning.

the staff came mostly from new york post and other murdoch papers. jesse angelo ran editorial. greg clayman as publisher had come over from mtv. the newsroom sat in the same midtown manhattan building as the post. early issues had long pieces and photo galleries that scrolled in unusual ways. the embedded video took advantage of the ipad screen too. it looked nice. that part was real.

~ the fall ~

the subscriber numbers were always vague. murdoch said at one point the daily had 100,000 subscribers. it was never clear how many of those were paid versus comped off auto-renewing free trials. either way the company was losing about $30 million a year. that loss became hard to defend once the news of the world phone-hacking scandal had already cost news corp a lot of management attention.

the bigger problem was that nobody really wanted a newspaper trapped in one app. the same year the daily launched, the new york times paywall went up on the open web. it worked. you could share a times article and read it on whatever device you had open. the daily was a sealed box.

~ the long tail ~

the staff was told in early december 2012 that the publication was closing. the final issue ran on december 15. some of the journalists were absorbed into the new york post. others left media entirely. the ipad-only newspaper model was never seriously attempted by anyone else.

the daily comes up now mostly as a footnote in arguments about whether subscriptions can save journalism. it was an early data point that said: not like this. the same answer arrived again with quibi about eight years later, in a different medium, after a much louder launch.

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