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Three Lessons From the Demise of The Daily

This article is more than 10 years old.

Failure is a better teacher than success, and the 22 months of The Daily's existence were full of teachable moments. In the wake of News Corp.'s decision to shutter the iPad-native publication, I talked to people involved in the launch to hear their thoughts on where it went wrong and what might've been done differently to prolong its life. I also have a few thoughts of my own.

In no special order, then:

1. Mo' money, mo' problems. Employing journalists isn't cheap. Just ask The New York Times, which can't afford the ones it has. The Daily launched with a news staff of more than 100 people. That's more than three times the size of the average daily newspaper's newsroom.

Why start off so big? The alternative, launching lean and scaling up, is a strategy practiced by successful digital media launches like The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Gawker Media, among many others.

The answer, simply, is that Rupert Murdoch had a specific vision for The Daily, and it involved having a big footprint from the get-go. There were those within News Corp. who urged a more modest approach, but they failed to persuade him.

The result: Even after The Daily laid off 50 people over the summer, it was still losing between $10 million and $20 million a year, making it a big target at a time when the company needs to burnish its publishing assets for a spinoff.

2. Apple Myopia. The Daily was the top-grossing subscription news product in Apple's iTunes store for most of its brief life. What does that tell you? That being No. 1 on the iPad wasn't enough.

From the start, analysts calculated that The Daily needed to collect on the order of 500,000 subscribers to start making money. At the time of last summer's layoffs, it was less than a quarter of the way there. Waiting almost a year to get onto Android devices may have pleased Apple, but it limited the potential customer base too much.

3. Pipped at the Post. The Daily shared more than a few strands of DNA with the New York Post, down to the style of its headlines and the obsessions of its gossip page. That's no coincidence: Jesse Angelo, The Daily's editor in chief, came from the Post, and it's to the Post he returns, as its new publisher. In fact, before it was dubbed The Daily, one of the names under consideration was The National Post.

The kinship was mostly a curse. The Daily did, in fact, do its share of ambitious enterprise journalism, like this 6,000-word jailhouse interview with renegade Amish bishop Sam Mullet, published today. But that stuff didn't get the attention it deserved, perhaps because it seemed out of place, even irrelevant to the rest of the content.

The Post can afford to be eclectic (if a newspaper losing $60 million per year can be said to be able to afford anything) because it has a geographic and sociological identity to keep it focused. A Post that wasn't New York-centric, blue collar and conservative would just be a mishmosh. That's what The Daily was too often.

Another hazard of being too like the Post is it encouraged News Corp. senior management to see the two as an either/or. There's no obvious reason shuttering The Daily should have been seen as an alternative to killing the Post, but that's exactly what happened, say people close to the company. More mental distance from the Post might not have solved The Daily's problems in the market, but it would've been helpful in the contest of internal politics.