The Daily—the iPad-only magazine and Newsstand guinea pig that News Corp’s Rupert Murdock launched at a press event with Apple—has been put “on watch,” and Marco Arment touches on one great reason as to why:
It’s weird to me, as a long-time internet-only news reader, to pay money for a bunch of content I don’t care about. More than half of each issue is sports news, entertainment gossip, ads, and little newspaper games (crosswords, Sudoku, horoscopes), and I need to buy all of that to get the news, editorials, and app reviews that I care about.
Bundling a bunch of stuff I don’t care about with the few pieces I want to read is the old-world model, when custom-targeted or on-demand news for each reader was infeasible.
Another problem? Besides the terrible performance and bundled content, The Daily has, since day one, existed in its own sandbox. There’s no way to get a public link for mentioning an article elsewhere. The only way to mention an article at all is to share it on Facebook and Twitter, but even then, when your friends click, they are greeted with a giant JPG that barely plays nicely in traditional browsers, never mind mobile devices. In fact, unless something changed recently, you can’t even copy and paste a single word, let alone a whole sentence, from The Daily articles.
How were readers supposed to inject The Daily into 21st century conversations, or simply spread the word about the publication, when it gagged them from doing so by design?
