THE DAILY
The Daily was the first iPad-only newspaper owned by News Corporation. It was first introduced in the United States and Australia. The original planned to launch The Daily was on January 19, 2011, in San Francisco. However, the launch was postponed by News Corporation and Apple and released on February 2, 2011, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
The cost for a subscription to The Daily was $0.99 per week. When the subscriber signs up for the services via iTunes, the system would deliver new issues to a subscriber’s iPad automatically. However, because of the disappointing result, the journal was “on the watch” in July 2012. The journal reporting loses about $30 million annually despite over 100,000 paid subscriptions.
On December 3, 2012, as part of News Corporation’s asset restructuring, News Corporation announced that The Daily would stop operations on December 15. Some of The Daily’s staff will be moved to The New York post as part of a major restructuring initiative at News Corp, but it’s not clear yet how many staff will make that transition.
CAUSES of COMPANY FAILURE
The Daily system
According to insiders at the publication, the content in the system loaded way too slowly and most of the time crashed in the middle of the article. Worse than that, the article was set that readers could only read the news the day they were published. The article will only last only 24 hours after published and will disappear from the system. That was not too convenient for the subscribers who had no time to read at 24 hour period time of the article and for people who want to read the news after midnight.
Single Platform
The Daily’s creator Rupert Murdoch chooses to put The Daily news away from where the people are. It trapped in an iPad while the trend at that time is the “sharing economy” of links on the web. More than that, the tablet market is still not the size to be the main distributor like a smartphone. Not many people would buy an iPad just to read the news published by The Daily. That is the factor the failure of the company when he makes The Daily can be accessed on a single platform which is by using an iPad.
Phone hacking Scandals
February 2012, The Daily absolutely has met their expectation of publication which are 100 000 paid subscribers and 250 000 monthly readers. But in spring 2012, News Corporation was involved in the costly and embarrassing phone hacking scandal which effect The Daily’s future. According to the senior staff, The Daily’s budget had been approved when the scandal hit. But then the entire budget has been pulling back by corporate. The corporate also announces that the company is splitting into two sides. Highly profitable media holdings on one side and the publishing ventures on another. After the spitting incident, the complete operating budget for The Daily is half than what it was in the previous year. That incident leads to the failure of The Daily.
