Groupthink at News Corp
More high-tech layoffs:
The Daily, News Corp.’s attempt to create a digital newspaper for the iPad age, is laying off nearly a third of its staff.
The publisher plans to tell its workers today that it will fire 50 of its 170 employees, according to people familiar with The Daily’s plans.
The initial release version of the app was so buggy and slow that I never did get around to giving the content a fair chance. I suspect that happened with a lot of people.
But calling it a “digital newspaper” is a bit of a misnomer. The Daily reads like a newsweekly, but with timelier articles — a strange hybrid beast which, apparently, has been unable to develop much of an audience.
And let’s think about why that might be.
If you want headlines, you hit your Twitter feed. For bloggy stuff, you go to your blogs. If there are longer pieces you want to read in full, you click on the links in your Twitter feed or from your bloggy buddies. The tech-savviest of all just get everything in RSS. Hardcore tablet readers might — might — have e-subscriptions to a major newspaper, such as the WSJ or the NYT. But mostly, we find our news socially.
So at what point in this process does it make sense to launch a tablet app, wait for it to load the most recent entires, work your way through its cumbersome interface, and then hunt down the stories you might want to read? Oh, good luck sharing the stories trapped behind the paywall.
The newsweeklies have been on a decades-long Bataan Death March. The newspapers aren’t far behind. Where did anyone get the notion that an electric hybrid of them could find a profitable audience?
No Twitter (or RSS feed) for me. Drudge still works, along with my.yahoo headlines. Plus Instapundit. I will listen to NPR, just to get a feel of the lefty narrative. Those plus pjmedia & hotair, with reading the links to the stories are my main sources.
It’s been interesting last week and this, lots of traveling for business and pleasure, read USA Today in Boston, and Richmond Times Dispatch here in Lake Gaston (NC/VA border), but even on the Touchpad, as long as I have wi-fi and can recharge, I don’t miss newspapers at all. News is more up to date online, even sports. The only thing lacking is the comics, which I’m not missing as much as in the past. Maybe go to Sunday only, for the weekly ads.
It’s funny how on-line apps keep repeating the same mistake: Make it look like print … and they will come.
Well … they don’t. Web information is an entirely different paradigm. You don’t want it to look like a magazine or newspaper. You want something readable, worthwhile, and – mostly – short enough to grasp in the time you have. The slick look of print is a a different animal.
You have to give them credit. The idea of an online “webzine” version of their print publication was a good one. In 1996!
It didn’t matter if it looked or acted like a paper or a weekly or a hybrid. Nobody who had it talked about any of the writing, nobody could, and later when they could, nobody linked or tweeted or trackbacked or reblogged or mentioned at the water cooler anything. Once a Daily article was linked to and discussed on Memeorandum. My memory is that out was a scoop. In print, paper or Web, it’s the writing. Look at what gets emailed and linked to in any online source, major news organization or personal blog. It’s the writing. Murdoch could have thrown a couple hundred more people to come up with content. If none of them could write a story, it wouldn’t have mattered. If audio and video clips, whiz bang touch interactive graphics had dazzled, the writing would be the only thing to keep readers coming back or recommending it to friends.
Drudge and his links are sufficient. Who needs to pay for NYT or the Daily when their sources are AP and Reuters which you can access for free? For opinions, read the Brit’s. They are more honest. They don’t hide behind their obviously bias “impartiality”, “professionalism”, and “speak truth to power” craps.