No difference from free content on the Internet

The daily content is mixed with news, ideas and information graphs, which are no different from free content on the Internet. Although the daily High-profile release has attracted a lot of attention, the publication does not create its own brand.

According to foreign media reports, it is too expensive, lack of reporting focus, and as a digital publication, it accidentally and the Internet segmentation. This is the first ipad electronic newspaper The Daily will be closed this month after the announcement, people through a variety of channels to express their views.

News Corp announced in Monday that the daily newsletter would be released on December 15, less than two years after it was published in January 2011. The app has been off the shelf from Apple's itunes, and in the past it has just received very bland feedback.

The daily has about 100,000 registered users who pay 99 cents a week, or 40 dollars a year, to download content created for touch screens every day. But this part of the income is not enough to support the daily's more than 100 employees and the millions of U.S. dollar losses since the release. At the beginning of the launch, News Corp said the daily operating cost of the daily was close to $500,000 trillion, equivalent to about 26 million dollars a year.

News Corp, which launched the daily, called it a brave attempt in the new media age. News Corp has also hired prominent journalists from other media, such as the former New York Post Page six editor Richard Johnson Richard Johnson, while others have moved from other parts of the company.

News Corp said it had invested 30 million of dollars in the daily release, and now admits it has no place in News Corp. News Corp will be split into two divisions, with the publishing business operating separately from the television and film business.

Rupert Murdoch, Chairman of News Corp, said in a statement that News Corp "cannot quickly find a large enough user base to convince us that the business model is sustainable in the long run".

Critics say the daily content is mixed with news, ideas and information graphs, which are no different from free content on the Internet. Although the daily High-profile release has attracted a lot of media attention, the publication does not create its own brand, no advertising campaigns, no subscription users can see the contents of the magazine, so the The daily does not cause any sensation in social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

Trevo Butterworth (Trevor Butterworth) wrote a column entitled "Information Society" for the daily. He says the daily application is disconnected from the vast internet, which limits the development of the daily. This July, the daily layoffs, from 170 employees reduced to more than 120 people, Butterworth is at this time to leave the daily.

As part of this reorganization, the daily also canceled a special view column, abandoned the sports report, but fully adopted news group's Fox Sports News seed. "The content is not widely shared and is not well known," Butterworth said. I feel that these reports are all in vain. ”

At the beginning of the launch, the daily was designed to take advantage of the explosive development of the tablet, and it was thought that people would usually read the newsletter in the morning or evening, just as they read magazines. But each issue of the Daily magazine is a huge file, sometimes reaching 1GB, and it takes 10-15 minutes to complete the download in a broadband connection. Matt Haughey, metafilter.com founder of one of the first community blogs on the internet, says this is unheard of in the field of news applications. Matt Haughe

Because the news content is not interconnected, the daily does not enjoy the traffic from content aggregation sites such as Flipboard and Tumblr. Haughe said: "They ignore a very obvious fact, that is the Internet." "While many people have given up on laptops for the sake of the portability of tablets, the era of all online content coming from applications rather than the Internet has not come." He said: "Perhaps 5 or 10 years later, the Internet will become less important, but for now, they missed this aspect." ”

It may also be a mistake for News Corp to develop the daily from scratch and put it into an environment that is trusted and well known to the readers of well-known brand sources. According to the Pew survey of 2011, 84% of mobile device users believe that the news app brand is an important factor in their decision to download apps.

The daily also has an intangible challenge, which is to be unique on the sea of Internet news, whether it be paid news or free news. Some national newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, pioneered a business model that uses news reports on complex topics to limit the number of free articles posted on the site, thereby gaining access to a number of users who are willing to pay for content.

Gannett, a publisher of 80 copies newspapers such as USA Today, also took full advantage of the fact that there were no other sources of information in some environments, and succeeded in boosting the revenues of local newspapers by creating a similar "pay wall".

However, the daily does not have an exclusive or local monopoly, so its business model is in a difficult position.

As a newspaper that publishes only digital editions, the daily does not have a clear coverage. Yas Benton Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman News Laboratory at Harvard University, said it was "competing with everyone, all things", but in such a large environment, it did not find a suitable model.

"It lacks a useful reporting focus," said Benton. "This delightful, ordinary, gossip free news is ubiquitous on the internet." I suspect that if the daily is able to do it again, they will first invest heavily in building their own brands. ”