Nieman Foundation at Harvard
It’s official: The Daily is closing.
Launched to high expectations in February 2011, the iPad-only daily “newspaper” was the target of much anticipation and sniping from the start. As early as April 2011, we were charting what seemed like a leveling-off of interest, and its choices — to charge for content in an era of free, to be platform-specific in an era for the platform agnostic, to ape a print newspaper’s publication schedule when little could seem less timely — made it a flashpoint.
I asked our 105,462 followers on Twitter for their thoughts on the cause of death. The lessons they tossed out fit mostly into four overlapping diagnoses:
The most common claim was that The Daily’s device-bound nature limited its potential. (The Daily started out as iPad-only, although it eventually grew to include iPhones, Android tablets, and the Kindle Fire.) Locking into a single platform and not having a web front door limiting sharing and social promotion, this argument goes. (The Daily’s stories do exist on the web; they’re just hard to discover without a Daily subscriber sharing them out first.)
It’s not just or even mainly that lots of readers don’t have iPads; iPad-owners are *extra* likely to want to shift & switch devices. #daily
— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) December 3, 2012
@jbenton too long to download, iPad only meant no skimming headlines online, $ too much, couldn’t link it. Needed web based freemium model
— Matt Haughey (@mathowie) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab Don’t limit yourself to a single online platform.
— Samir Mezrahi (@samir) December 3, 2012
.@niemanlab never publish a story you can’t link to from Twitter
— Matt Berger (@byMattBerger) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab Your content HAS to live across multiple platforms (digital, print, etc).
— Ashley Mayo (@AshleyKMayo) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab The App Store is not a distribution strategy. End of story.
— Optimus Publishing (@OptimusPubs) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab The Daily never learned this rule:you have to give people what they want, how they want, when they want it.
— Phil Kearney (@PhilipHKearney) December 3, 2012
@jbenton I never used The Daily because first it was iPad only, and then when it came to Android, I had no idea what I would be getting.
— Patrick Hogan (@phogan) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab Newspapers shouldn’t restrict themselves to just one platform. An iPad paper is fine, but limiting it *to* the iPad was a mistake
— Penn(@Penn36) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab Don’t blame the platform. Sluggish apps and bloated downloads are the wrong way to do digital magazines.
— Lucas Rotondo (@Lucas_Rotondo) December 3, 2012
Or maybe it was the content. The Daily’s stories were criticized as an odd middlebrow mix, aiming a tabloidish sensibility at an early-adopter audience. There were some very solid scoops and features along the way, but it didn’t feel essential to most.
@jbenton I think this light entertaining digital content isn’t suitable for paid content yet + way too high fixed costs
— Tim Herbig (@herbigt) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab Quality of content always speaks louder than the platform- especially when a pub. picks a platform with a limited reach.
— Evan Moore (@evancmo) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab Without quality content and a useable interface, digital publications will always fail, no matter how cheap their cover price.
— Peter Henry Manges (@petermanges) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab everyone is needed, no one necessary. The Daily wasn’t necessary for anyone.
— GabrieleFerraresi (@GbrlFerraresi) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab Understand your audience. #Daily
— MarkKohut (@MarkKohut) December 3, 2012
The Daily was a bet that “original reporting” had immense inherent value in the web age. But it’s not enough – has to be *about* something.
— Mark Coddington (@markcoddington) December 3, 2012
The Daily’s entire case to the public was, “We have original reporting! And we’re on the iPad! Read us! Pay for it!” The public said, “So?”
— Mark Coddington (@markcoddington) December 3, 2012
Another school of thought: The Daily was too big, too corporate, too locked into a daily-newspaper mindset.
@niemanlab If you hire 100+ newsroom staff, most of them should be employed in producing original/non-fungible reporting, not presentation
— Mario Tedeschini-Lal (@tedeschini) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab If market penetration of your platform is still small, create a smaller cost structure to sustain the pub in early years.
— Frank Sennett (@SennettReport) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab News companies of the future must be like a startup, not a bureaucracy. The founding premise of a “Daily” no longer applies.
— Joe Taiabjee (@joetek) December 3, 2012
@jbenton startups should start with one or three people and grow organically through focus & iteration. Daily started with ~200.
— David Jacobs (@djacobs) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab Once a day content update,no matter how good the quality is, is not enough
— George Zafolias (@GZafolias) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab Focus on content, then on UX. Be lean – newsrooms of 20+ people are yet too big.
— Xavier Laumonier (@xavierlaumonier) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab Newsrooms cannot revolve around their execs and their whims, which was a major problem @daily had all along.
— Taryn Wood-Norris (@tarynbwood) December 3, 2012
(That’s from Taryn Wood-Norris, who was/is (?) senior designer at The Daily.)
Then again, maybe the problem was just about making money: charging in an environment where most content is free and mobile advertising is still immature.
@niemanlab That paywalls are idiocyncratically succesfull. Because it worked for WSJ, did not mean it would for The Daily.
— Taylor Owen (@taylor_owen) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab Mobile publications should build for phones first, tablets second. This drives content & advertising strategies.
— Noah Chestnut (@noahchestnut) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab Lack of standardization of mobile app ad formats still a problem. Lack of ad space, compared with web, another one.
— George Zafolias (@GZafolias) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab Broaden mobile platform access (#iPad only?), optimize for social sharing, syndicate + reconsider pay wall for commodity content
— Aparna Mukherjee (@aparnamuk) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab Device agnostic and free is the only way to monetise until micro-payments mature and mainstream. You’ll always need > value diff.
— Simon Schnieders (@s_schnieders) December 3, 2012
@niemanlab – Mobile is accretive channel for multi-platform media providers…authentication into larger subscription relationship
— Bob Carrigan (@BobCarrigan) December 3, 2012
I think each of these arguments has some truth. But I think in the end, the demise of The Daily was most about #3: the structure.
Here’s the thing: The Daily had over 100,000 paying subscribers. That ain’t nothing! With most subscribers paying $39.99 a year (others paid 99 cents a week), minus Apple’s cut, that’s around $3 million in annual revenue — and that’s before you add in advertising revenue. At various points, it was the highest-grossing app in the App Store in 13 different countries. In the United States, it’s been in the top 5 of news apps by gross since launch and, until this summer, consistently in the top 20 of all apps — even including Angry Birds and the rest.
You can absolutely build a real online news organization on that kind of revenue. You just can’t build one that has 200 staffers. Or 150 staffers. Or 100 staffers.
It certainly didn’t help that the app itself was grindingly slow for too long (although it did get faster over time). And it didn’t help that the content was fungible and a little mushy.
But to see the glass as half full: The fact that an outlet with its problems could still generate 100,000 paying subscribers is a sign that an outlet with a sounder strategy, a more defined ambit, and a more realistic sense of scale could get even more. The number of people with tablets will keep growing; people’s comfort with paying for digital content will continue to increase; companies will get smarter about production efficiencies.
And on a day when News Corp. gets a step closer to breaking up, let me take a moment to praise Rupert Murdoch for giving The Daily a try.
News organizations have been talking about the need to create new products for a while, from the days of Newspaper Next and before. But it’s mostly been talk; faced with their own individual fiscal cliffs, news executives have spent the past half-decade cutting and cutting and cutting, which hasn’t left many resources to use on building new things. News Corp. — in large part because it’s part of a big corporation that can take “Avatar” money and move it around — made a pretty big bet on an idea.
It didn’t work out. But at least they tried.
