The Observer’s Kat Stoeffel gleefully takes the piss out of Murdoch’s iPad baby.
Her kicker is equally vicious: “What The Daily does offer, one imagines, is some insight into the mind of Rupert Murdoch. He is the only person we know who reads it every day.”
What Stoeffel would have us believe is that Rupert Murdoch is some doddering “cuddly Emperor Palpatine” whose foray into technology is as misguided as your grandma buying an iPhone. But as much as Murdoch deserves all of the scorn he has coming to him for the phone-hacking scandal, I think The Daily still stands as a courageous editorial experiment. $30 million may not be a lot of money to Rupert Murdoch, but it’s still $30 million—and he’s invested it in an editorial startup. That’s an investment in journalism regardless of whether or not you believe in the brand.
The article reads like pure schadenfreude. Yet as much as it may be fun to point out CMS issues and personnel departures, these are not incredibly telling. All startups have these. The real questions are: Is The Daily finding any traction with its readers? Are its number of subscribers increasing? Will Murdoch continue to fund it if the numbers plateau? Has the walled garden of the iPad hurt their content? What are the difficulties they’ve found exposing people outside of iPads to their content?
Stoeffel poses the question herself:
“Now, with James under the spotlight and The Daily’s top patron, Rupert Murdoch, looking increasingly vulnerable, one wonders just what will become of the tablet paper, which has already cost News Corp. some $10 million without yet making a dent in the national conversation.”
Yes, one does wonder.
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