Why the iPad Newspaper is Doomed

Rupert Murdoch is putting $30 million and 100 journalists behind an iPad newspaper called “The Daily.” He even has support from Apple CEO Steve Jobs. But no one really believes this thing will last. Here’s why.

Murdoch has taken to the iPad project with a zeal not seen since he grossly overpaid for The Wall Street Journal in order to have a prestigious, national newspaper to play with. The News Corp. chairman loves the iPad and Apple’s charismatic, tightly wound CEO Steve Jobs, who is rumored to be co-hosting The Daily’s launch and who might, we hear, even bundle the app with new iPads. Murdoch has installed as The Daily’s editor News Corp. golden boy Jesse Angelo—grade-school chum of Murdoch heir apparent James Murdoch, son of media investor John Angelo, and former managing editor of the News Corp.-owned New York Post. The Daily is quite literally a dream of Murdoch’s: It came to him in a 2am vision during a restless night in his Fifth Avenue penthouse.

All of which is to say Murdoch can’t be enjoying the coverage of his newspaper of the future. Every media pundit seems to have his own pet reason or two (or three or four or five) why The Daily will flop. Stitch those arguments together and you’ve got a veritable wall of skepticism—one that seems well founded.

It’s slow and backward

The Daily will be put to bed each night for consumption the next day, just like a newspaper. As David Carr put it in the New York Times, “a button will be pushed and it will be ‘printed’ for the next morning.” That decidedly retro delivery model might sound appealing for Murdoch, a newspaper sentimentalist whose overpaid for the Journal by several billion dollars, but it’s going to seem poky for a generation of Facebook readers who tend to want read yesterday’s news yesterday, not today. As Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg wrote, “Wonderful! Slower news—and at a higher price.”

The content is unfocused

Like an old-fashioned newspaper, The Daily will try and cover everything. Music writer Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker is on board, as are a handful of veterans of News Corp.-owned papers, like Richard Johnson, Chris Wilson and Justin Rocket Silverman of the Post and Pete Picton of the Sun. Other hires include ex-Politico reporter Avi Zenilman and Hunter Walker, formerly of the entertainment website The Wrap. There will be people writing about politics, crime and society. Quaintly, there will even be an a dedicated opinion section.

That broad scope might be workable for 100 journalists if there were some aggregation going on — some borrowing and sharing work done by others — but the vast majority of The Daily’s content is supposed to be original.

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