Online newspaper The Daily folds after just 2 years

Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp has announced that The Daily, the online newspaper launched in 2010, is folding.

Some of The Daily staff will return to their previous home at the New York Post. Murdoch (of Fox News fame) said in a statement that The Daily was a “bold experiment” that couldn’t expand readership fast enough to keep pace with the business model it was based on.

That’s basically corporate-speak for admitting that the plan to target a news service at tablet users was a mistake, wrote media critic Felix Salmon of the Columbia Journalism Review. Murdoch also spent a fortune trying to create unique news content for The Daily, without much of a return on investment.

Writing at his blog, The Audit, here’s Salmon’s take:

“Tablets, it turns out, are a great way to consume content which was designed for some other medium, like books, movies, and videos. But weirdly, magazines and newspapers are having a harder time of making the transition: There are many books I prefer in electronic format, but there isn’t a single magazine or newspaper which I’d rather read on the iPad than on paper.

“The promise of the iPad was that it would usher in a rich-media world combining the versatility of the web with the high-design glossiness of magazines; the reality is that it fell short on both counts. The Daily was Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to get a head start in the new medium, but in this case the medium simply isn’t good enough to get traction: the only iPad-native content which has worked really well has been games.

“As far as news and journalism are concerned, the verdict is in: Tablets aren’t a new medium which will support a whole new class of publications -- there’s almost nothing you can do well on a tablet that you can’t just put on a website and ask people to read in a browser. Publications of the future will put their content online, and will go to great lengths to ensure that it looks fantastic when viewed on a tablet. But the tablet is basically just one of many ways to see material which exists on the internet; it’s not a place to put stuff which can’t be found anywhere else.”