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The Media Apple News

News Corp's The Daily iPad App Shutting Down On December 15 106

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."
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News Corp's The Daily iPad App Shutting Down On December 15

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  • by osssmkatz ( 734824 ) on Monday December 03, 2012 @09:38PM (#42175211) Journal
    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.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Their content wasn't linkable? So you weren't able to share links to articles on Reddit/Twitter/FB/tumblr/email/etc? They clearly didn't understand the web.

    • by mea_culpa ( 145339 ) on Monday December 03, 2012 @10:04PM (#42175357)

      The content was interlaced with intrusive adverts that seemed to take over. In a magazine you could easily flip over the ads and even read ads that caught your eye. The Daily put them front and center in your face. People aren't used to paying for apps and being force-fed ads.
      This and the mostly homogenized content was enough for me to uninstall it.

      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        The Daily put them front and center in your face. People aren't used to paying for apps and being force-fed ads.

        What did you think news papers were?

        • by Anonymous Coward

          The Daily put them front and center in your face. People aren't used to paying for apps and being force-fed ads.

          What did you think news papers were?

          Have you never flipped past a newspaper ad without having to sit all the way through it once in your life? Try to keep u.

          • by mjwx ( 966435 )

            The Daily put them front and center in your face. People aren't used to paying for apps and being force-fed ads.

            What did you think news papers were?

            Have you never flipped past a newspaper ad without having to sit all the way through it once in your life? Try to keep u.

            You do realise that newspapers are just vessels for advertisements, don't you? The paltry A$2 they charge for them doesn't even cover the cost of printing.

            Why are you (or anyone else for that matter) surprised that a newspaper app is just a vessel for advertisement.

            • by Anonymous Coward

              I don't usually have a problem with advertisements. But an advertisement that acts as a roadblock to the thing I'm interested in is a real annoyance. See: traditional tv programs, hulu, news apps that force feed you adverts, interstitials (and formerly pop-[up|under]s) on the web, et al.

            • by hairyfish ( 1653411 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @01:12AM (#42176279)
              It's not the fact that it has ads, it's nature in which they are delivered. I read my local paper online and ads just sit there on the side of the page like a conventional paper. Like a regular paper I can choose to read the ads or not. But if they were forced onto me full screen so I have to actually click something to move them away before being allowed to read my paper, then I will not read that paper any more. That strategy was doomed from the beginning.
              • by Rich0 ( 548339 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @08:32AM (#42177959) Homepage

                Yup - this is why internet advertising is so reviled.

                A newspaper is a page of black and white articles with some black and white ads nearby.

                An online newspaper is a page of black and white articles, with some subset of:
                1. Full color ads.
                2. Ads that contain motion within them.
                3. Ads that stay on screen even as you read down the page.
                4. Ads that move around within the screen.
                5. Ads that actually pop up over top of the article you're trying to read, and you get to try to close them.
                6. Ads that do dynamic stuff that is broken on the browser you're using, so you have to resort to hacks like selecting text to try to get the page to scroll it out of the way of the text you're reading.
                7. Ads that actually try to force you to watch them by blocking content and enforcing a time delay.
                8. Ads that actually give you a quiz on the presented material before letting you see the article. (Yes, I've actually seen this.)

                People don't have some kind of revulsion for online ads simply because they're online. People just hate ads that are intrusive. The last time I went to a play there were ads in the playbill, and I didn't care. Before the play started somebody thanked and named a sponsor or two, and I didn't care. Now, if in the middle of Act 1 Bozo the clown jumped in front of me and started waving signs and blowing his horns, then I'd care.

      • by Tuoqui ( 1091447 )

        Sorry but if I'm paying for an app I'm not doing it to be forcefed Ads. If I wanted that I'd pick up the newspaper.

        Caveat: The only ads that should be in a digital one would be the classifieds.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

      Have you always had this annoying habit of answering your own questions right after you ask them? Remember, this IS News Corp.

    • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Monday December 03, 2012 @10:34PM (#42175561) Journal

      Didn't understand it?

      I'd say that they loathed everything about it and built accordingly:

      The Web? If you put it up there, somebody probably has a cache even if you take it down. The Daily? Either the memory hole was a deliberate feature, or their developers somehow managed to miss some awfully basic lessons on content storage and organization. The Web? More or less works on anything with enough RAM for a browser. The Daily? Works with a single, blessed, app for a single platform. The Web? It isn't called 'the web' because linking is difficult... The Daily? Not so much.

      I'm not on the 'zOMG, HTML5 4 lyfe! We should replace all native binaries with javascript that bit-bangs a canvas tag to provide the lousiest graphics performance since the introduction of the "2D accelerator" back in the day!' bandwagon; but I am deeply underimpressed by the fad of creating 'apps' that are little more than the platform's HTML engine wrapped in enough vendor-specific shitsauce that you can't call the result a webpage anymore. It appears to be for 'mobile' what building website menu structures entirely in Flash for no obvious reason whatsoever was to the web of old.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      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.

      Why was this an app and not a website? If it was a website they could have easily archived material. It also would have been indexed by Google, which means people could stumble upon their articles later if they were curious. If they really wanted to target iPad readers, they should have just made a mobile website. Fail number one. Fail number two, if I understand right, there's advertising in the PAID version? I entirely understand ads in the free version, but in the paid one? Lastly, locked to one vendor

    • by pete6677 ( 681676 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @12:34AM (#42176153)

      Too many news websites, like this Daily bullshit, have way too many stupid fucking videos. If I wanted to watch TV I'd watch TV. Yet another sign of the continued dumbing down of America (possibly the entire world).

      • by Anonymous Coward

        I'm on satellite internet with a stupid cap and I only watch a few videos a week if they are worth it. I hate clicking on a news article only to find a clip from cable news. If you only have the story in video form then I just ignore it and move on to a site that doesn't suck so much.

      • Exactly (Score:3, Insightful)

        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.

    • No, they didn't accidentlally not use the web, they purposefully made it anti-web. They don't like the sharing that's possible. They just wanted a digital distribution system that enforced their copyrights. And that's what they got. Not surprisingly, its not very lucrative to have content restricted like that.

    • Because it was trying to be a newspaper on your phone. Most people aren't horders and so they only have one issue at a time. Murdoch is old and trying to keep things like the old way.
  • by Press2ToContinue ( 2424598 ) * on Monday December 03, 2012 @09:42PM (#42175225)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by PopeRatzo ( 965947 )

      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.

      There is a third group: those who believe your so-called "learning" is really a tool of Satan and the liberals.

      That's News Corp's target audience.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by bhcompy ( 1877290 )
        No, that is Fox News' target audience. Rupert Murdoch knows how to make money and he knows that putting all your eggs in one basket is an easy way to kill your business. Jason Whitlock, one of the most prominent and controversial columnists for Fox Sports, is decidedly anti-gun(as noted this weekend on national television) and decidedly a minority(might as well assuming you're going full derptard in your vitriol). That won't stop him from continuing to be one of the most prominent and controversial colum
        • by samkass ( 174571 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @12:23AM (#42176109) Homepage Journal

          ...Except that this is about The Daily, which definitely had a right-wing bias. I stopped reading it pretty early because I was tired of it bashing Obama and his policies every chance it got. It's one thing to provide analyses and counter-arguments, but they'd interject editorial comments all over the place without a shred of evidence. There are enough other places to get news... don't need what amounted to FOX News Tablet Edition.

        • Murdoch is a modern day Barnum, he finds ideological freaks and brings them together, gladiator style.
    • by Kittenman ( 971447 ) on Monday December 03, 2012 @10:12PM (#42175413)

      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.)

      Isn't passive learning a contradiction in terms?

      I remember when you could buy a tape that would teach you French/Algebra/Brain surgery while you slept. You played it on a cassette under your pillow. If it worked (it didn't) that would be passive learning.

      BTW I also look askance at people who say that there are types of people. There are many types of people. The ones who generalize and a whole lot of others.

      • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Monday December 03, 2012 @10:59PM (#42175687) Journal

        I'm not sure that the grandparent poster's distinction is drawn quite correctly; but I'd argue that it does fall somewhere near the truth. It isn't really the activity or passivity of the learning that differs; but the activity or passivity of the volition to seek out information according to some internal objective, vs. a willingness to attend to whatever information a nearby stimulus is providing.

        That said, the distinction is only really sharp in somewhat extreme or rather contrived cases: 'Child who reads about stuff for fun vs. child who listens in class and delivers solid Bs, and doesn't touch a data source at all on vacations and weekends' type of thing. In situations where you don't necessarily know what you don't know, the 'active' learner will also function by seeking out people or reference material that know more than he does and listening to them, just as the 'passive' will(if it will be on the test, of course).

        The other confounding factor is probably reading speed. People vary widely, surprisingly widely even within similar educational and social backgrounds, in how fast they can read. In my experience, it seems that people who can read atypically fast, substantially faster than 'normal' speaking pace, tend to find assorted 'multimedia enriched content', 'educational TV' and even informational radio rather galling unless used purely as background noise for a primary task.

        People who read as, or more, slowly than a normal speaking speed, though, tend to enjoy audio and audiovisual information presentation much more. It seems sensible enough: without rather clever algorithms(which are rarely used for this purpose) you can't speed up audio without going all Alvin and the Chipmunks on it, and people don't. Text, though, (aside from messy typography questions which can make things more or less legible) is read at a pace controlled by the viewer, not the producer. If you read quickly, audio and A/V will feel inefficient, because they are. If you read slowly(and don't suffer from any notable verbal-comprehension impediments), audio and A/V will feel engaging; because it is both faster than text and far more 'natural' and less fatiguing than an attempt at speed reading.

        • by Arker ( 91948 )

          If you read quickly, audio and A/V will feel inefficient, because they are. If you read slowly(and don't suffer from any notable verbal-comprehension impediments), audio and A/V will feel engaging; because it is both faster than text and far more 'natural' and less fatiguing than an attempt at speed reading.

          Exactly. For me, video news is incredibly inefficient. They take 10 minutes to tell me a story I could research better myself in 2. What a waste of time! But even in an academic setting many of my cowork

      • As a couple of respondents have pointed out, by my simply saying that there are two types that I have made an over-simplification, but I didn't say "only" two types. :) So it's fun to see people adopting an opposing stance and trying to tear my ideas down because truly by doing so they attempt to steer the ship of learning and, exhibiting the "active-learner" characteristic I mentioned, they learn because they are partaking in an active role and thus act as examples which support my theory. If they had read

        • "There are two types of people" means exactly what it says, if you meant something different then you should have used different words rather than attacking people because of their inability to read your mind.
          • by sperm ( 916223 )
            Actually, there 10 types of people, those who understand binary and those who do not. I know its an old one, but I could not resist it here
      • I look askance at people who look askance at people.

    • by Quiet_Desperation ( 858215 ) on Monday December 03, 2012 @10:25PM (#42175473)

      There's two types of people: those who think there's only two types of people and clear thinkers. :-)

      But seriously, stop with these monochromatic views of the world already. It's destroying us as a society.

      Most people will fall into both categories on different topics. Sometimes I want the deep knowledge you can only get a from a book with lots of very detailed text and diagrams. Other times, yeah, I want Mythbusters, and anyone who thinks less of me for that is warmly welcomed to piss off and croak.

    • I think learning from a "Daily" newspaper is overall a bad idea. Since time is of the essence, a typical news story gets just enough background research that by comparison would make Wikipedia an authoritative source. Just look at the history lessons you would have learned from reading the news at the start of the Iraq War 2 or during a presidential election.

      Note that I differentiate between learning and the accumulation of random facts or trivia. If knowing that Kate is going to have a baby is learning, th

    • I hear Time magazine is having trouble moving beyond that demographic [theonion.com], so the transition may be harder than you think.
    • So where does an old fart like me fit in. Most the time I don't even see the fireworks because I have this superpower called "focus".
  • That's FOX undo undo

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03, 2012 @10:05PM (#42175365)

    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.

    • by Quiet_Desperation ( 858215 ) on Monday December 03, 2012 @10:18PM (#42175433)

      Ties? Seriously? I'm in charge of multimillion dollar R&D involving stuff that gets shot into space and I wear polo shirts, jeans and sneakers daily. Even customer meetings are just slacks and dress shirts, but I have some awesome space themed ties that I like to wear for those.

      People need to wake up and realize "dress for success" was invented by clothing manufacturers.

      • I love the GQ and Men's Health articles that show the outfits that you're supposed to wear. Suit - $3000, Shoes $750, watch - $8000. Yeah, sure.

        • by Quiet_Desperation ( 858215 ) on Monday December 03, 2012 @10:30PM (#42175525)

          One place I wish we could stop expecting fancy dress is job interviews. We get these college grads in with fancy suits and ties, and they're in a room with us casual guys asking them questions, and I feel like I'm the only one who sees the societal dysfunction at play. Saw a guy going to interview for a dockwork job in a suit once. WTF? Who decided the suit and tie was the magical norm for... whatever it's supposed to mean? Is part of the whole thing where males tend more toward rigid social structures? Ah, for retirement cabin in the woods...

          • by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @01:57AM (#42176457) Homepage
            Do you REALLY not understand, or is this one of those play-acting things where someone pretends not to understand to "show how ridiculous society is". Showing up in a suit says, in our ridiculous society's unspoken language, "I'm serious about this job and I'm willing to conform to your expectations." It's just something that's expected to get any decent job, much like a college degree. Guess what: every society has its unspoken rituals and if you don't conform to them you won't be accepted as a member of that society.

            If you're one of those "oh, that's such bullshit, I would never do that to get a job" then congratulations for having such remarkable skills that you can shrug off job offers. It may be news to you that the rest of us don't enjoy such luxuries. But then again, you're the only one who sees the societal dysfunction at play, so I'm guessing you're not really used to thinking outside yourself.

            • I've gotten further in life than most doing my own thing, so I'll stick with it. I certainly don't give a gnat's fart if that gets your or anyone else's feathers in a ruffle.

          • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

            Saw a guy going to interview for a dockwork job in a suit once.

            I once interviewed for a security guard position at a smallish company. There were 450 applicants for the job this was back in '00 just after the medium and heavy industry crash here in Ontario back before you had to be licensed. I beat out those other applicants by wearing a suit. I didn't stay at the job long, maybe three weeks but it kept the bills paid until I got hired on elsewhere.

          • by Xest ( 935314 )

            It's because most people look their smartest in a suit, so when you interview you want to see that your prospective employee can actually look presentable to a client in case they ever have to meet them.

            It doesn't mean you expect them to wear that all the time, but the point is when dealing with clients you can't assume what their standards will be. A suit is always a safe bet for clients, hence it's always a safe bet for interviews.

            But for what it's worth where I work currently we have an extremely casual

            • Like I said, we do dress better for customer meetings.

              I get why it's done, I just thinks it's all so stupid. Looking smart? Spending ten extra minutes putting on a costume proves something deep and important about a person? I'm sorry, but society is reading way more into it than it deserves.

              Greedy politicians and other sociopaths who want to rip you off or fuck with your life wear a lot of suits, too.

              What's amazing is how speaking out against something like suit and tie beings out such bile laden responses

              • by Xest ( 935314 )

                Oh I absolutely agree, I don't buy into it either, I was just making the point that some people do, and if those people are your clients you have little choice.

                There's people like you point out on one side of the spectrum that think everyone should wear a suit and tie.

                There's people in the middle like you and I that think it's silly, but will do it if our clients expect it so that we can make the sale or whatever.

                Then there's people at the other end of the spectrum who think it's silly and refuse to go thro

        • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Monday December 03, 2012 @10:44PM (#42175609) Journal

          I love the GQ and Men's Health articles that show the outfits that you're supposed to wear. Suit - $3000, Shoes $750, watch - $8000. Yeah, sure.

          Clearly, if you were dressing for success properly you wouldn't be scoffing at those prices. Perhaps you'd be interested in a motivational seminar, a penny-stock scam, or some usurious consumer credit?

      • Arguably, there are two operationally distinct branches of "dress for success". Among the not-totally-fucked, you have the variant that serves as fashion-as-competition. This is the one where the guidelines are vague "western business casual"; but the intricacies of style are endless and you are being assigned a grade(that you don't get to see).

        Among the lost and the damned, you have the variant that serves as fashion-as-submission. Enforced compliance with a meaningless detail is just such a good reminder

    • Did they, by any chance, cherish the belief that the 'tech' side of publishing could be solved merely by writing large checks to Adobe?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Posting AC for same reasons. The developers were NEVER aware of how much RAM/processor they were using at any given time with the app, which is frightening, given how often it would choke out iPads in the app's first year. They did no cross-iPad testing beyond making sure high-res content would scale down to iPad 1/2. No interest in efficiency. You knew an ad was about to load because the page would take so much longer to generate.

      The Daily was the worst of both worlds. None of the immediacy of constantly u

  • by Roogna ( 9643 ) on Monday December 03, 2012 @10:06PM (#42175373)

    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.

  • NewsFail (Score:5, Funny)

    by mjwx ( 966435 ) on Monday December 03, 2012 @10:24PM (#42175463)
    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.
  • Kind of sad (Score:4, Informative)

    by therealobsideus ( 1610557 ) on Monday December 03, 2012 @10:59PM (#42175685)
    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.
  • Well, this one is pretty obvious. I'm seeing it in the job I took a month ago. Instead of giving users what they want, the website is deciding what it wants to show. That's backwards. It's good to see they went out of business, but how many people got negative performance reviews and lost raises and bonuses because they had been given an impossible mandate from the top?
  • by EmperorOfCanada ( 1332175 ) on Monday December 03, 2012 @11:04PM (#42175719)
    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?
    • facebook [...] is unlikely that your screen will fill with crap telling you how cool usher or rihanna is over and over

      Doesn't that rather depend on your friendlist?

      Actually I can't really fault the musical tastes of mine but I do wonder how many of them are going to fill time after Facebook and Zynga part company.

  • Good news! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by onyxruby ( 118189 ) <onyxruby&comcast,net> on Monday December 03, 2012 @11:29PM (#42175835)

    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.

      • No people pay for the Wall Street Journal over the daily because of the *unique* content it offers.

        By definition anything you "create" is going to be unique.

        "Pretty and Experience" bullshit is part of the reason it failed.

        I never said anything about "pretty", I talked about the user experience. Simply hosting high definition content is not enough, the user experience has to be a good one. Ad infested, slow, hard to use and annoying all trump content.

    • Coincidently Murdoch also own the WSJ, swings and roundabouts?
    • by T.E.D. ( 34228 )

      If this had been 'successful' you would be seeing a /lot/ more companies charging for online content

      If this had been successful, you would have seen leprecauns riding unicorns over the rainbow, because some serious perversion of normal reality would have had to transpire.

      I said this back on the first Slashdot story about Murdoch doing this [slashdot.org] was posted in 2009:

      Perhaps Mr. Murdoch thinks he has some grand business theory that nobody on the web has ever thought of before to make pay content work. But unless porn is involved, he's wrong.

      • My point isn't so much on paid web sites, (which I oppose) but on success. I am not endorsing paid web sites. I picked one liberal and one conservative site to show both political slants could make money.

        The WSJ embraces both rules I talk about. They also get away with charging for content without being a porn site. You would think Murdoch would have learned from the WSJ?

  • ....the "nothingofvaluewaslost" tag?

    C'mon guys!

  • I tried out this app when it first came out, and after a couple of weeks, I deleted it. The problem wasn't the multimedia experience (which people are claiming has something to do with it). The problem was there was basically no news being reported. It was nothing but sports and politics (that masqueraded as news). What I found is that I could get my actual "news" from so many different sources. I'd have no problem paying for a service if it actually gave me something useful, but this was one of the most us
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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