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The Daily
February 4, 2011 - 2:28pm
Quote:
Rupert Murdoch launches the Daily for iPad. Jessica Valenti quit feministing to write a column for this pay-for-content enterprise.
Thoughts? This week's launch of Rupert Murdoch's iPad "newspaper," The Daily, is a milestone: It's the first significant attempt, since the Web conquered the digital world in 1995, to create a major new media product that embraces technology yet spurns the Web -- and the public Internet, too. Chris Anderson's Wired "Web is Dead" package was the warning shot for this phenomenon, but The Daily's introduction puts it in front of us in palpable touch-screen form. It boldly declares: We're digital people but we're not Web people. Why do I say that The Daily spurns the Web and the Net? I mean, beyond the obvious reason that there is no Web site that offers its contents in a convenient form each day. It's not just that. The Daily also contains no links. (Some today see this as a plus; I do not.) There are no RSS feeds. No email addresses to contact the writers and editors. No email alerts or mailing list. Comments on the articles, yes, but not reachable through the Web. No, archives, back issue index, or search! (They're on Twitter, however. They have a blog, too, and it's not bad.)
I thought the whole idea behind delivering content for the ipad in a magazine format was to use the capabilities of the web to make it a different experience than print. Launching such a publication could prove less daunting than finding the money to pay for printing costs, and then hoping to recoup them through sales. But if it is isolated from the web ...
Indeed, Duncan - Many MSM "apps" like the Globe's, the New York Times and (gulp) rabble.ca's have actually gone to a CD-ROM type closed format which actually isolates its content from the internet, whose main attraction is its rhizomatic diversity and reach. I don't think those formats will survive--I already use Flipboard or FLUD which aggregate twitter, facebook or RSS feeds. A much more, shall we say, democratic way of doing things. Murdoch's Daily seems to take this isolation one step further--offering ex-clusivity rather than in-clusivity. And it's "Daily," which is about 23 hours and 58 minutes slower than the internet's average pace. Not the direction the internet is going--and they expect people to pay for it. But their actually paying for less, since there is less connectivity. I don't anticipate the revolution The Daily is heralding.