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News Corp's The Daily iPad App Shutting Down On December 15
An anonymous reader writes with news that, as predicted, the iPad only newspaper The Daily failed. From the article: "The goal of The Daily was to provide a modern spin on the news cycle by delivering world news draped in a multimedia experience. In other words, The Daily devoted a lot of resources towards adding photos, video, and touch controls to news stories that would otherwise be static. ... It was announced today that The Daily will be closing up shop on December 15 after failing to rake in the dough."
The Daily had OK content. But they did not understand the web. More than once, I took advantage of their trial period, would read a little bit of the daily paper, only to find that the next one had been delivered erasing the previous content. There was no archive, despite continual promises to add one. I told them I would subscribe as soon as they added this feature. Also, why did they require an app to get the content? That meant it wasn't linkable, was restricted to only one device, and couldn't easily be shared.
I firmly believe there are two groups of people: those who want information to "feed" them (passive learners) and those who want to drive the learning experience (active learners.) The passive learners want to have information pushed on them, and have it entertain them and distract them, a la Mythbusters style. The active learners don't want their information to move, wiggle, flash or distract them. They have decided what they want to know and are trying to learn it quickly and efficiently. The active learners go to great pains to get websites to stop moving, flashing, spinning and otherwise try to grab their attention so they can focus on their reading. The passive learners (children, those without a learning goal) would not complain about distractions on websites, instead they seek them out, but generally would not be seeking studious information anyway. Probably more the entertainment and sensational-style news-consumers I would think.
I believe this "newspaper" experiment points out that their target audience consisted of a more mature customer, active-learner, seeking "newspaper-style" news and prefered to drive the experience and learn quickly and efficiently. I don't believe the experiment failed, I think they just misunderstood their audience.
Perhaps if they had tried that with news aimed at grade-school age children they would have found a different acceptance rate.
Sent from my ENIAC
Posting as AC for obvious reasons.
I interviewed for a job to fix their platform architecture and duck-tape together a proper QA setup for them almost a year ago. What a bunch of idiots! HR and my (thank god) not-to-be manager were absolutely clueless, had no idea what they were talking about and were blatantly unprofessional. The office was "Everyone has a 27-inch iMac and a matching 27-inch thunderbolt display" kinda tech (I'm not joking) and the their 'tech guy' who dropped in the interview asked, "I see PHP on your resume. That's a scripting language, right?" I couldn't make this shit up. Somehow this bunch of incompetent fools managed to turn out a digital publication, no wonder they failed.
Another NewsCorp entity tried to hire me for an iOS QA lead role, and they constantly complained about the quality of their developers. First, I was shocked they could even try to recognize quality, but then I realized that having to wear a tie M-F (non-negotiable) and arriving strictly at 9am, with no perks to speak of, yeah, they were only going to get shitty iOS developers.
If the media companies can't figure out that charging people to view ads is no longer a workable business model, well then... can't help 'em.
OK, Murdoch couldn't even get money out of Apple users. I think it's time for him to admit he has no idea what he is doing.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
So you're saying Android users like apps that emulate crippled web sites with intrusive advertising? That seems odd.
Blank until
I actually liked the Daily, especially since I could have it download the mornings news to my ipad that I could read on the train. But there were problems. I didn't like that it wouldn't download the video content and some of the photos. The whole point of downloading the content ahead of time was because I knew I wouldn't have a connection later on.
Hello this is the 19th century and it wants its app back. From what I can tell the whole news corp model is that each of its wings leverages the others. So you have music and movie people being relentlessly promoted by the news media wing and those entertainment people are generally available for the media while each of the media departments tries to work with greater levels of efficiency brought on by the huge size of the organization in things like centralized sales great cross promotion and the power to make the worthless acts worth far more than they should. What seems to suffer is quality. The various departments will now spend more time promoting each other than a normal media company normally would (which would be zero if it was independent) instead of a relentless pursuit of self improvement. And because an over promoted crap product can be far more profitable than the risk of finding and cultivating a good one they lose the later art. For a while through the 80s and 90s this model was great. But now people are able to continuously demand best of breed in every category the model is starting to become weak. People find new artists their own way and are being told less and less by a small group of baby boomers what to listen to and what to watch. We are finding shows on the likes of AMC (Who the hell knew AMC existed 5 years ago?) We download from iTunes we read blogs, and we watch YouTube (Hello PSY).
To give a simple example of the old way of thinking there is a TV rule on the big networks that Thursday around 8pm - 9pm is the best of the best. So what they would do is to put a show people wanted (Friends) on at 8 until 8:30 then they would put some shlock they wanted to promote on at 8:30 and then something people wanted again on at 9pm. Even if you really didn't wan to watch the 8:30 show they knew you might catch a few minutes after the first show and maybe a few more before the 9pm show and ideally you would simply leave the 8:30 show on and say what the hell. The internal politics for getting your show on at 8:30 were a bloodbath and it certainly had little to do with what people actually wanted. The first big change was of course cable with an ever greater selection of channels, then came DVR devices which made programming timing more and more irrelevant and now there is the slow but sure move to netflix type technologies. All of these are not only resisted on the grounds of piracy or business models but significantly on the basis that the network executives lose the power to foist total crap onto the population. They are having a harder and harder time making it rain on demand.
So when these geriatrics bought MySpace they thought they had another channel where they could start pushing their crap into kids faces. But what they didn't realize was that things move really fast on the internet and their audience slipped through their fingers as soon as they felt that Myspace was not working for them but against them. Not that facebook is some paragon of virtue but it is unlikely that your screen will fill with crap telling you how cool usher or rihanna is over and over.
That this app is being taken out behind the woodshed is not so much an indication that news on the iPad is not the future but that best of breed news as sort of found with Drudge shows that it can work just fine. So if you look at the fragmented modern media world you have the old giants playing every backroom game they can to keep their old models working while you also have a few shining lights of hope (Netflix, if not them then something like them) and interesting Gems hidden here and there and generally not within the old giants. Can anyone here see the people who came up with the Cosby Show greenlighting Breaking Bad?
This is good news, and not because of the politics of News Corp. If this had been 'successful' you would be seeing a /lot/ more companies charging for online content. As anyone who has ever subscribed to a magazine, paid for a newspaper or bought cable knows, paying for your media doesn't save you from advertising.
The news has become a commodity, and with media sites outsourcing most of their work with Reuters and the Associated Press they have also outsourced their identity. Frankly for most people it doesn't matter whether they get their news from Toledo or Seattle because it's all the same news.
I've said before and I'll say again that there are two ways for a media site to succeed on the Internet. Two rules - eight words.
1. Your user experience matters.
2. Create relevant quality content.
If you obey those two rules you can and will do well online. Look at the Wall Street Journal, they charge for a lot of their content and still make money, why? The user experience isn't user hostile and the experience of using their web site is fairly pleasant. They also create unique content through their own journalism with quality stories. The New York Time is in a similar situation.
By following these two simple adages they make a lot of money compared to their competitors. One of these publications leans left politically, the other leans right and yet they both succeed where others fall flat.
Two rules - eight words.
1. Your user experience matters.
2. Create relevant quality content.
If you obey those two rules you can and will do well online. Look at the Wall Street Journal, they charge for a lot of their content and still make money, why? The user experience isn't user hostile and the experience of using their web site is fairly pleasant.
No people pay for the Wall Street Journal over the daily because of the *unique* content it offers. You can get news about Britney/Bieber lovechild [High School Gossip] anywhere; Wall street journal is about money and investing. "Pretty and Experience" bullshit is part of the reason it failed.
I have to devote my full attention to understand what's said in videos thanks to audio processing disorder, and few news videos include captions/subtitles... I wouldn't mind as much if they were just as informative as reading, but it takes most 5-10 minutes to cover as much as a reasonably short paragraph, making it a huge waste of my time & energy.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
People still *watch* the news? I can't even remember the last time I actually watched a news story on TV or online.
Personally, I can't think of anything worse than being drip-fed only the news others want to give me, only the news that's "exciting" on video, only the news that can occupy time on-air, only the news that needs a 500Mb download in order to get the gist when 1000 words and a couple of links give me infinitely more information, etc.
I'm not a news-snob, I don't really care what I read because I take it *all* with a pinch of salt and anything interesting I run off and check facts myself. But being force-fed video of someone else's news is probably the worst thing I can imagine in terms of actually absorbing the information within, without finding out what's actually going on, and just allowing yourself to be "brainwashed".
Ever seen the 80's UK comedy series "Drop the Dead Donkey"? Set in a news-room, there's a character called Damien who is the guy who runs out with a camera and comes back with something visual to run. Every time I hear someone *watches* the news, I think of him using the same teddy bear as "the shot" for everything from an air crash to a terrorist attack to a motorway accident to a flood. It can't be far off the truth of how much news is twisted to make it visually appealing.
News isn't a thing in and of itself. It's a trigger for you to run off and find information on something, well, new. Anyone who just "consumes" news nowadays was probably not bright enough to move on from 70's-style news programming.
But I agree, the intersection was vanishingly small, especially when combined with "willing to pay to read a news paper". I haven't paid for a newspaper in my entire life, but I read several of the free ones for entertainment. I get most of my actual news from sites specialising in my interest. If I waited for the things that I *do* find interesting to come on the news, I'd die before I saw anything. But if I ever want to watch a cow being rescued from a flood, I'm sure I'd only have to wait about a week or so.