HISTORY’s Moment in Media: The Rise and Fall of The Daily, the First iPad Newspaper

It was February 2 2011 14 years ago this month and Murdochamp8217s News Corporation was launching The Daily the worldamp8217s firstever iPad newspaperApple had introduced the iPad barely a year earlier but the challenges the digital era brought to the business of news were much older Since the dawn of the consumer internet era in the mid1990s the adbased business model that had long underpinned newspaper publishing had been collapsing Worse it was generally seen as nearimpossible to get people to pay for things they navigated on the web But Appleamp8217s iTunes Store which opened in 2003 had created a new model one in which users could seamlessly and easily pay for media they downloaded to their own devicesThat seamless payments system combined with the ease and elegance offered by the iPad suggested to Murdoch always a newspaperman at heart a route to reinventing the newspaper for the digital ageHe went all inOn Fox Business Murdoch called The Daily his amp8220No 1 most exciting projectamp8221 His son James then a senior News Corp leader called it amp8220our flagship projectamp8221 Rather than simply repurposing content from existing News Corp outlets like the New York Post The Wall Street Journal or Fox News The Daily was purposebuilt from the ground up by what was reported to be a team of more than 100 people and with a budget of 30 million Designed to be a massmarket general interest newspaper it had bureaus only in New York and Los Angeles and relied on freelancers elsewhere Murdoch and company recruited some top talent for the team including a music critic from The New Yorker and Richard Johnson the longterm gossip kingpin of the Postamp8217s Page SixMurdochamp8217s belief or hope was that without paying for big expensive printing presses and the physical distribution of newspapers he could make enough money via recurring payments at the iTunes Store to make this new publication profitable In the classic newspaper model the introductory subscription price was set low to encourage readership 99 cents a week or 40 per year after an initial free two weeks sponsored by Verizon and advertisers including HBO Virgin Atlantic and Range Rover enlisted to reach those readersThe Daily was a highly designed polished app that really did look and feel like something new or at least something a lot different from a typical newspaper website Many commentators said that it felt more like a magazine than a newspaper with its bold photography and embedded video But one thing may have felt awkward for a digital publication True to its newspaper roots it was published every morning and not typically updated throughout the dayReports were that Murdoch hoped to reach 500000 subscribers over five years At the time of the launch only 15 million iPads had been sold worldwide The Daily was in English and available only to a US audience At the oneyear mark February 2012 the number of subscriptions for The Daily was reported to be 100000 Several months later in July it was reportedly amp8220on watchamp8221That December with still just 100000 subscribers and losing tens of millions of dollars annually New Corp shut down The DailyIronically in March 2011 just a month after The Dailyamp8217s launch The New York Times for the first time implemented a paywall on its website a move that eventually led that legacy news organization to become the worldamp8217s most successful digital newspaperPosted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership selfpublishing platformClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillageorgMyersBizNet

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HISTORY’s Moment in Media: The Rise and Fall of The Daily, the First iPad Newspaper

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HISTORY’s Moment in Media: The Rise and Fall of The Daily, the First iPad Newspaper

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