July 9-10, 2013
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Buried in a lengthy press release about News Corp’s long-proposed business separation, the company unceremoniously announced the end of The Daily, its experimental iPad-only news app.

Production of the Daily’s iPad app will cease on December 15, 2012, though News Corp says its brand will “live on” in other properties. Additionally, News Corp’s experience with The Daily won’t go to waste — the company says technology and “other assets,” including some staff, from the app will move to the New York Post. The Daily publisher Greg Clayman will lead News Corp’s digital strategy.

The news isn’t a huge surprise since The Daily cut 30 percent of its staff in July. The Daily launched in February 2011 and reportedly cost News Corp about $30 million a year. It eventually made its way to a few Verizon Android tablets, as well as Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The plan was to break even after five years — but it appears The Daily’s slow growth made that plan unsustainable.

As the first all-iPad magazine, The Daily also saw some initial support from Apple. Eddy Cue, vice president of interactive services at Apple, joined Murdoch on stage to launch the app. But even from the beginning, it seemed like a big production for a fairly limited market. After testing it out for a few weeks, I let my Daily subscription lapse and never gave it a second thought.

“From its launch, The Daily was a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation,” News Corp chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch said in a statement today. “Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term. Therefore we will take the very best of what we have learned at The Daily and apply it to all our properties.”

News Corp announced back in June that it would split into two separate publicly traded companies. Today the company revealed that its future publishing arm will retain the name News Corp, while the entertainment arm will be called Fox Group. Murdoch will continue to serve as chairman of News Corp, but will be handing the chief executive role to Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. Murdoch will serve as chairman and CEO for Fox Group.

Cameron Yuill, chief executive of AdGent Digital, says the failure of The Daily came down to a simple math problem:

Not enough subscribers to cover the cost of production and distribution (Apple’s 30% fee). The Daily had reportedly 100,000 subscribers at $40 per year which by my math is only $4 million annually. The mistake News Corp. made was hiring (expensive) editorial, journalists and technologists to build and provide content for the newspaper. No doubt overhead was way in excess of income. Murdoch has made the decision that The Daily is not growing fast enough to ever have a chance of covering its costs, let alone making a profit. So The Daily bites the dust. Fair enough.

July 9-10, 2013
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Digital magazine The Daily has laid off nearly a third of its staff to help the unprofitable publication save costs, parent company News Corp. announced today.

Since the launch of the The Daily in February 2011, people have wondered if an iPad-only publication could make enough money to be sustainable. It currently loses $30 million a year, and executives projected that it would take five years to break even. With News Corp. planning to split its publishing and entertainment businesses, that timeline doesn’t look so viable anymore.

In a press release, The Daily said it would cut 50 full-time employees, or 29 percent of its full-time staff. The sports section will be gutted and replaced with content from “partners” like Fox Sports. The opinion section will be cut entirely.

The publication also said it would move to a “portrait-only orientation,” which could help it save money on development. Videos will still be viewable in landscape mode.

Photo: The Daily

July 9-10, 2013
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Tablet newspaper The Daily has attracted more than 80,000 paying subscribers and 40,000 non-paying trail-only readers each week, it revealed Monday. The numbers are a sign that the News Corp.-owned innovative digital publication could succeed over time.

Ever since the launch of The Daily in February, people have wondered just how well an iPad-only publication could do when there are so many news sites available and many established news brands with their own iPad apps. The New Yorker iPad app, for example, has more than 100,000 iPad readers, with more than 20,000 exclusive subscribers on the iPad and more than 75,000 print subscribers using the app as well. An iPad-only New Yorker subscription runs $59.99 a year.

Even with the positive-looking subscriber numbers, The Daily is far from having a sustainable business model in its current state. The publication charges $0.99 a week for access, so with 80,000 paying subscribers it brings in about $80,000 a week. But it costs $500,000 a week to run, so it will take time to attract enough subscribers for it to break even.

So far The Daily has offered its content only to iPad owners, but it will soon launch an Android version that can run on other tablets. Those will include 10-inch Android tablets like the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and 7-inch tablets like the just-announced Amazon Kindle Fire. Availability on the Kindle Fire and other Android tablets should help the publication attract more subscribers.

The Daily’s readers spend between 20 and 30 minutes reading the app each day and view around 40 pages of the 120 pages published daily, according to Localytics. Those are promising engagement numbers and are an indication readers will continue to consume Daily content regularly.

What do you think of The Daily? Do you think an Android launch will help it build a larger following?

July 9-10, 2013
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Does the world really need another tablet magazine? AOL sure thinks so. The company introduced its own spin on the concept this morning with the launch of Editions for the iPad.

Just like Rupert Murdoch’s much-ballyhooed Daily iPad magazine, Editions — available free on the App Store — delivers a single issue every day to users. But unlike The Daily’s pursuit of original content, AOL’s entry pulls stories from around the web to suit your interests. Basically, if the popular iPad app FlipBoard and The Daily had an unholy app child, it would be Editions.

“Our goal for Editions was to take the best of the online and offline reading experiences and fuse them into a single, sleek magazine unlike anything else that exists today,” AOL’s head of mobile, David Temkin, said in a statement today.

Indeed, Editions feels like a paper magazine, right down to the horoscope on every issue’s last page. But that may work in the app’s favor, especially with more mainstream users not used to the Sisyphean task of juggling constantly updating news readers and RSS feeds. The best thing about Editions is that you can actually finish it.

Here’s how it works: Upon first launching the app, it asks for your location (for weather and local news), and then has you log in to Facebook, Twitter, and AOL Instant Messenger. You’re then asked to choose from 15 topic suggestions, after which your first issue is compiled (a process that took my iPad 1 a few minutes). The compilation time was faster than it took me to download The Daily, which can get a little hefty since it also includes large pictures, video and other media.

After your first issue is ready, which will sit somewhere between 30 to 40 pages, you can schedule future issues to automatically be delivered every morning. Clicking into your first issue, you’re presented with a page that contains a live forecast, calendar (that syncs with Facebook and iCal), and the lead story. Beyond that, there’s a table of contents (no big surprises there), and then the app presents you with your selected story sections.

Stories are generally presented as short summaries that link back to their source sites. When looking at a story at its source, you can add and remove tags to personalize the content you want to appear, and you can also promote and reduce the amount of stories coming from particular sources. Editions allows you to read some feature stories entirely from within the app. And not surprisingly, you can share stories via e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook.

You can edit the sources of each section, and for sections like Technology and Business, you can also tell Editions to follow particular companies and products. Editions pulls its content from a variety of sources, but it doesn’t take any from your social networks like Flipboard does. That means you’re at AOL’s mercy when it comes to content sources. I was able to add VentureBeat as a source in the tech section, but the popular mobile site Boy Genius Report was nowhere to be found.

After using Editions for a few hours, my first impressions are generally positive. It’s a stylish app that offers some respite from information overload. Still, there are some stability issues. The app crashed several times during testing, and in doing so also lost my reading position.

Temkin tells me that they’re aware of the issue: “We are receiving reports of crashes under certain specific circumstances. We are investigating this now and hope to deliver a fix very soon,” he wrote in an email.

I asked Temkin if there was anything AOL didn’t have a chance to include in the first version of the app: “There are many, many things we’re considering for future releases, but we feel great about the feature set of the first release,” he wrote. “Too much complexity in an initial release is rarely a good idea; and we want to get actual user feedback before locking down our post-1.0 roadmap.”

He also says that AOL is keeping an eye on the Android tablet market, but for now the company is focusing on the iPad since it has the most users. “Our goal is to reach the largest possible audience, and we will go where the audience goes. As things stand, the tablet market is more or less equivalent to the iPad market,” he said.

Editions is just one aspect of AOL’s mobile strategy, as he told the audience at our MobileBeat conference last month. He said that AOL surpassed Microsoft last month as the No. 4 mobile destination venue, and pointed to the AOL Play app as the sort of mobile innovation the company is hoping to continue.

July 9-10, 2013
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Rupert Murdoch’s ambitious tablet newspaper The Daily may not be an iPad-only affair for too long. The paper is apparently prepping for a jump to Android tablets in the second quarter of this year, sources tell All Things Digital.

During The Daily’s launch event earlier this month, Murdoch said that the paper would look at expanding to other tablet platforms as they get developed. But he also said that “we think last year, this year, and next year will belong to the iPad.”

That led some to believe that The Daily would focus on the iPad for this year and possibly delay a jump to Android until next year. Now it seems the paper is planning to take advantage of the new wave of tablets that will run the tablet-friendly Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” release, which are expected to arrive in the second and third quarters of this year.

It makes sense that The Daily would want to leap platforms as soon as possible. While the iPad is the most popular tablet platform at the moment, this year will likely see Android tablets making significant gains. The sooner The Daily can establish itself as the go-to news source on that platform, the better.

While the paper is strictly News Corp.’s baby, it has received lots of technical assistance and publicity support from Apple. Steve Jobs himself was expected to appear at The Daily’s launch event, but, possibly due to his health issues, he instead sent Apple’s vice president of Internet services Eddy Cue.

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Apple’s Wozniak notes white iPhone 4 camera issues, showers more love on Android — The Apple cofounder said this week that early white iPhone 4 parts caused issues with its camera, which led to multiple delays and its near-mythical status among gadget hounds.

Verizon halts iPhone pre-orders due to huge demand — Well that didn’t last long.

Call of Duty Black Ops map pack keeps Activision’s hot franchise rolling — Activision Blizzard has released a new set of multiplayer maps for the Call of Duty Black Ops combat game, and hundreds of thousands of people are already playing it on the Xbox 360 game console.

News Corp. exec: “The right time” to sell Myspace — Just in case anyone wasn’t sure about News Corp.’s desire to unload Myspace, chief operating officer Chase Carney said Wednesday that “now is the right time” to consider selling the social networking service — or find another way to restructure its relationship with the parent company.

Rambus invents extremely fast memory system for the gadgets of the future — Hoping to advance the speed of everything from computers to game consoles, Rambus announced that has invented an extremely fast way to transfer data through a computer’s memory system.

And here are five more stories we think are important, thought-provoking, fun, or all of the above:

With Honeycomb, Google has a shot at catching Apple in tablets — For the first time, Google has a chance at catching up with Apple in the hot tablet computer market.

Which is selling better: Chevy Volt or Nissan Leaf? — They’re the first two plug-in electric vehicles sold in the U.S. by major manufacturers in a decade. Thus far, the Volt is decisively in the lead.

Can we really trust the cloud? — Events in Egypt, Canada, and around the world have brought cloud advocates back to Earth.

IBM, Intel, TechStars and the White House start up America — No, America didn’t suffer a breakdown. But according to a “Startup America” campaign launched by the White House to encourage high-growth entrepreneurship in the U.S., it could use a jump-start of entrepreneurial energy.

News Corp. has spent $30M on The Daily iPad newspaper — Rupert Murdoch’s new publication will have to be a huge hit to pay off.

July 9-10, 2013
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News Corp’s The Daily iPad newspaper is the first app to support one-click subscription billing, and Apple’s vice president of interactive services Eddy Cue says that the feature will soon make its way to other apps.

The addition of subscription pricing is a big change for Apple, as it will allow news publications to price their apps similar to print media. Users won’t be asked to manually pay for a new issue every month (like current iPad magazines), and advertisers will have a better sense of an app’s readership.

News Corp is offering subscriptions to the The Daily at 99 cents a week, or $39.99 a year. That’s certainly much less than traditional newspaper subscriptions, although it may seem high compared to typical magazine subscriptions. The app will also feature ads, even though users are paying for it. News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch said that by charging a subscription fee, The Daily will be able to attract high class advertisers who will pay more.

July 9-10, 2013
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Rupert Murdoch is finally launching The Daily today, but there’s already been plenty of talk about the long-rumored iPad newspaper. One of the big topics of speculation has been the amount of money Murdoch is pouring into this effort.

Now News Corp has confirmed that it has already spent $30 million on The Daily and that it will cost about $500,000 a week to keep it going. Back when the $30 million number was reported last fall, other publishers were scratching their heads — Sarah Chubb, president of Conde Nast Digital, said it “doesn’t make any sense.” (News Corp’s digital media chairman and CEO Jon Miller said in December that the $30 million estimate was too high, but, uh, I guess he didn’t get the memo?)

That means The Daily is going to have to be a huge hit. At 99 cents a week (split with Apple), it will need hundreds of thousands of subscribers to break even on subscription revenue alone. (Murdoch said he eventually hopes to make half the revenue from advertising.) In comparison, Conde Nast’s Wired iPad app averaged 31,000 in monthly sales between July and September.

July 9-10, 2013
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This morning News Corp finally announced its highly anticipated iPad newspaper app, The Daily.

Rupert Murdoch hit the stage at a special press event in New York to talk about why he wanted to create an iPad-specific publication. “New times require new journalism. Our challenge was to take the best of conventional journalism … and combine it with the best of new technology,” he said. “Our aim is for The Daily to be the indispensable source for news, information, and entertainment.”

Murdoch said The Daily will cost just 14 cents a day (99 cents a week, or $39.99 annually), and emphasized that there are no costs for distribution like there are with traditional dead tree newspapers. News Corp.’s target audience is the “more than 15 million Americans who are expected to own tablets in the next year.”

Murdoch said he’ll be able to determine if The Daily is a success once he sells millions (big surprise). He said that News Corp. has spent $30 million on the project so far, and it will run at a cost of $500,000 weekly.

As of a few minutes ago, The Daily app is live on the iTunes Store. Thanks to a sponsorship with Verizon, the app will be free for the first two weeks. (It’s unclear if this means the next two weeks, or the first two weeks after users download the app.)

The Daily’s editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo, publisher Greg Clayman, and executive creative director John Kilpatrick next hit the stage to demonstrate the app. They say that they’ve been doing live production for six weeks with staff working around the clock. “We have people from television, from newspapers and magazines, working hand in hand with designers and developers. The iPad allows us to tell stories in different ways than we did before.”

They demonstrated 360-degree photographs and high-definition videos, content that’s very well suited to tablets. The Daily will produce up to 100 pages of new content every day. News Corp. has developed some innovative ways to find content, including a carousel of pages, a shuffle button to bring up unread stories, a television-like news anchor and an audio button to read you stories.

“The Daily is not an island,” they said. You’ll be able to share stories on Facebook, Twitter and via email. You’ll also be able to record audio comments. The app features a built-in web browser, and certain pages also include Twitter feeds. There’s also an apps and games section to The Daily, which will link you directly to the iTunes Store.

Eddy Cue, vice president of interactive services at Apple, joined them on stage to confirm that Apple was also very excited about The Daily. He said that Apple has built a subscription billing option — a first for any iOS device — that’s “as easy as one click.” The subscription feature will make its way to other publications soon.

When asked how back issues are handled, Daily editors said that for now all of the content for the paper is on the web. You’ll be able to save articles, but it sounds like that’s akin to a bookmark. They’re working towards putting more content on internal storage, so you’ll be able to view it without an internet connection, in future versions.

When asked if The Daily will ever make its way to other tablets, Murdoch said, “As other tablets get developed, we will develop the technology to get there.”

As for sharing content from The Daily, the editors said that when you share a specific story, friends will be able to see it on the web. General web users won’t be able to access those stories otherwise, and they can’t just browse around The Daily’s content from the web. It’ll be interesting to see how this works out — one of the longstanding arguments against something like The Daily has been that it will keep content out of the free web. This current method seems like a balance between being closed and completely open.

When asked why News Corp. didn’t just make The Daily free and ad-supported, Murdoch said that advertisers would probably lower their rates if it was free. Now, he says, the company will be able to get a better class of advertisers at higher rates. At first he expects subscription revenues to amount for more than ads, but eventually he hopes for it move towards 50/50.

Via Engadget

As The Daily prepares for its hoopla-filled launch Wednesday at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, pundits are debating the app’s chances in a news-soaked marketplace, and details are leaking out. For example, The Poynter Institute’s Damon Kiesow has amassed a partly speculative, but fairly exhaustive list of the publication’s editorial staff, which includes former employees of the New York Post, the Associated Press, The Atlantic, AOL News, and lots of other national publications.

Kafka says The Daily is “almost defiantly anti-Web,” given its standalone nature, its lack of aggregation, and its barebones Web site, which will be free but will feature only a “grudging sample” of about 10 of the day’s stories. The actual iPad version of The Daily is apparently very newspaper-like, though, with six sections and an early morning, once-daily publication schedule (though there apparently will be some minimal midday updating). It will cost 99 cents per week, although the first two weeks after Wedneday’s launch will be free as a promotion.

Some of The Daily’s stories, according to people who have seen the app, look like any other newspaper story, but others – some of them with no text at all – are graphics-heavy and sport interactive capabilities like a zoom function. Reportedly, the app will feature 3D video, but that’s apparently coming sometime down the line.

Much is made of The Daily’s walled-off nature. Some critics have said this will be its downfall. And it could be. But it’s also the case that people who work online (like media pundits and journalists) tend to think of everyone else as reading news online all day, too. It could be that there is a large audience for a single daily online publication.

If so, it has to be high quality, argues news industry analyst Ken Doctor. “Our time is lots more valuable than 99 cents a week,” he writes, “and reading The Daily means adding a new daily habit, replacing some other news reading, we’d think, or some other activity to be sure. To displace other habits, newsy and otherwise, it must compel our attention.”

Doctor notes that events in Egypt this week will provide the perfect test for Murdoch’s insistence on publishing once a day with minimal updates. “If it has yesterday’s Egypt news, as the revolution goes down, it will read like yesterday’s paper, while CNN excels live from the street. That’s the advantage the Journal, the Times and every newspaper has — a print compilation still valuable as a package to tens of millions and the ability to do continually updated news.”

Given the public-relations blitz, the app’s unprecedented endorsement by, and promotional help from, Apple and the ease of subscribing via iTunes, The Daily is almost certain to do well at first. But Doctor, like Kafka, wonders what will happen when the buzz dies down. Again, the app’s walled-off nature comes into play here: most online media marketing is based on Web search and referrals from Facebook and Twitter links. How will those things work with The Daily? And “what might it do with a Flipboard?” Doctor asks.

Clayton Morris of the News Corp.-owned Foxnews.com has five wishes for his sister publication’s app — nearly all of them to do with his desire for links to outside publications, the ability to tweet articles, etc. But it seems Murdoch is betting that there is a substantial audience of non-tweeters out there — people who just want to sit back and read the news without feeling the need to go hopping around online.

July 9-10, 2013
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James Murdoch is the chairman and chief executive of News Corp. And he’s the son of Rupert Murdoch, the mogul who created the far-flung media empire that includes everything from Fox Broadcasting to the Wall Street Journal.

Murdoch offered a window into the tough problem of straddling two different businesses, new media and old media in a talk at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich this week. While News Corp. is anchored in the old world media, it has to invest in new media such as The Daily in order to survive, he said.

He began his talk by discussing the upcoming launch of The Daily, the first newspaper created from the ground up, exclusively for the Apple iPad.

The Daily has a staff of 126 people and Murdoch said it will stand or fail on the quality of its journalism, not fancy graphics on Apple’s tablets. It will likely sell for 99 cents, although it isn’t clear whether News Corp. will offer alternative payment models such as subscriptions.

Murdoch said The Daily will have original stories, not generic posts ripped out of the latest news feeds. He said that News Corp.’s overall mission is about “storytelling.” That can be digital or physical, but Murdoch acknowledged that the vast majority of revenue comes from TV, while newspapers themselves are less than 15 percent. Although The Daily is all digital, Murdoch said the company still believes in paper products and that some of its newspapers and books are setting new records.

Murdoch was interviewed on stage by journalist Kai Diekmann, editor in chief of the Bild Group. Here’s our video of a portion of the interview.

Disclosure: The Digital Life Design conference paid my way to Munich so I could moderate a panel. VentureBeat’s coverage of the conference remains objective and independent.

July 9-10, 2013
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For the third time in seven years, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has temporarily stepped away from the iconic tech company to tend to his health.

In a brief, terse media advisory, the company quoted from an email Jobs sent to all employees announcing that he was taking a temporary medical leave.

As on the past two occasions, Apple COO Tim Cook will run the company in Jobs’s absence. In August 2004, Jobs underwent surgery for a rare form of pancreatic cancer and returned to work after a month. In January 2009, Jobs took a six-month medical leave for what the public and Apple investors later learned was a liver transplant.

The company has been widely criticized for failing to publicly lay out its succession plan, although Apple says the board has one in place.

This week, Apple and News Corp. were widely expected to announce The Daily, a new online newspaper designed for Apple’s iPad tablet. That announcement was delayed, purportedly because of a problem with Apple’s software for handling media subscriptions.

Jobs has been heavily involved in the launch and development of the iPad, so his medical leave may raise questions about the reasons for the delay in the Daily announcement.

Here’s the email Apple says Jobs sent to his employees:

Team,

At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple’s day to day operations. I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we have in place for 2011.

I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy.

Steve

The postponement apparently has nothing to do with the app itself, but with Apple’s new iTunes subscription method. Apple will automatically charge users either weekly or monthly and will automatically update the app every morning as new editions are published. Apple reportedly must “tweak” the new service before The Daily can be launched.

The Poynter Institute’s Damon Kiesow took the initiative to peek into the source code on The Daily‘s “coming soon” Web site and found a few tidbits there, including an image depicting a couple of sample front pages. They consist mainly of giant images and sport the headlines “Oprah’s Biggest Gamble” and “A Bridge Too Favre.” So it looks more New York Post than Wall Street Journal, which is no surprise.

In related news, Apple Insider reports that Apple has told some European newspapers that they must stop offering their print subscribers free access to their iPad editions through the App Store. Doing so, of course, means Apple’s usual 30 percent cut is reduced to zero.

“Content providers are upset with the change,” Apple Insider reports,  ”characterizing the move as one that makes Apple ‘too dominant.’”

Apparently, no U.S. newspapers have so far heard from Apple on this issue.

July 9-10, 2013
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Jon Miller, the chairman and chief executive of News Corp.’s digital media group, walked an amusing tightrope today at Business Insider’s Ignition conference today. When asked about News Corp.’s in-development iPad newspaper called The Daily, Miller emphasized that the company hasn’t confirmed the iPad newspaper’s existence — then he proceeded to talk about what News Corp. would be thinking if it was working on such an app.

Miller recalled first looking at the iPad about a year ago with News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal’s managing editor Robert Thomson.

“It kind of blew our minds,” Miller said, and they believed it might really be a, yes, “game changer” for the media industry.

Data about how people use their iPads suggests that optimism is justified, he said, because the iPad is “a real media consumption device.” People spend much more time playing games and consuming other media on the device than they do on a PC.

This idea of an iPad newspaper has faced plenty of skepticism since rumors of The Daily began. Critics say the content will be locked away in an app, a retro move in a time when the industry is all about sharing content across apps and adding social components. Others, like Conde Nast’s digital chief Sarah Chubb, say that News Corp is spending so much money on the project that it will be nearly impossible to make a profit. Miller hasn’t comment on the first point, but he said Murdoch isn’t “nickel and diming” the newsroom. At the same time, he said rumors that News Corp is spending $30 million on the project are too high.

As for when The Daily is coming out, Miller said if such an app exists, you should expect the launch in the first quarter of 2011.

Miller also discussed the future of News Corp-owned MySpace, as I covered in a separate post.

[photo by Owen Thomas]

July 9-10, 2013
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News Corp mogul Rupert Murdoch is making a big bet on the iPad by hiring big-name (read: expensive) reporters for a new “iPad newspaper” called The Daily. And other media organizations are skeptical.

For example, publisher Conde Nast has made a big deal about iPad versions of its magazines like Wired and the New Yorker, but when Conde Nast Digital president Sarah Chubb was asked about The Daily today at the Ignition conference, she said, “It doesn’t make any sense.”

She noted that Conde Nast was able to revive Gourmet Magazine on the iPad, but that’s because Conde Nast only “put a little bit of money into Gourmet Live, and we’ve gotten our money back.”

Plus, Conde Nast can use the technology from the Gourmet app in other applications, so that investment will pay off elsewhere. The publisher will be unveiling more iPad-exclusive content next year, but it will probably migrate some of that content onto other platforms. The Daily, however, will have to be “one kick-ass newspaper” if it wants to make a profit, Chubb said.

Beyond the cost to News Corp, both Chubb and Kevin Krim, Bloomberg’s global head of web properties, pointed out another problem — news is a social experience. People want to share news and discuss it. That’s hard to do when all the article are locked in a single app on the iPad.

“It’s a newsletter, not a newspaper,” Krim said.