Why tablet magazines are a failure
Dedicated magazine apps for tablets may look good, but I fear they’re headed straight to oblivion.
Dedicated magazine apps for tablets may look good, but I fear they’re headed straight to oblivion.
News Corp. has said it is finally shutting down The Daily, the iPad-only newspaper it launched in 2011. Although the media giant should be given some credit for experimenting with a new medium, there were obvious signs that The Daily was doomed from the start.
News Corp concedes its pioneering tablet-only news title is not popular enough to continue as anything other than a learning exercise, marking the failure of one aspect of Rupert Murdoch’s tablet odyssey.
The Huffington Post has dropped the price of its iPad magazine to zero, and News Corp.’s The Daily has chopped almost a third of its staff — more evidence that the dream many publishers had about the iPad being their savior is still far from reality.
Rupert Murdoch’s struggling iPad newspaper The Daily is laying off 50 of 170 employees and also implementing other cost-saving measures, including decreasing opinion and sports coverage. The changes will help the publication “be more nimble editorially,” editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo said.
Remember when Friendster was the hot social network, publishers doubted that ebooks would ever sell, and Netflix (s NFLX) thought DVDs in red envelopes was the future? We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002.
News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch has confirmed that the company is considering splitting itself in two, with the newspaper assets spun off as a separate entity. What would — or could — the digital future look like for that standalone newspaper unit? Here are a few ideas.
“Virtually every publication in the world right now would desperately like to be 100 percent digital,” said Flipboard editorial director and Time Inc. vet Josh Quittner said at Internet Week this week, as publishers debated how to monetize digital magazines.
The Daily is finally available in Android, sort of. The News Corp. (NSDQ: NWS) tablet tabloid, which has been iPad only since birth, is not…
News Corp has stopped stonewalling about The Daily’s circulation following reports from Bloomberg that the tablet tabloid had 120,000 weekly…