I wasn’t really planning on downloading The Daily - I don’t care much for Murdoch, or his news outlets, or the concept of The Daily - but given the amount of coverage it’s been getting, I figured should at least give it a spin if for no other reason than completeness.
Enough has already been written about the handful of successes and numerous failings of the app, and my experience didn’t deviate from those very far:
- It takes forever to load
- The carousel is slow, and not the correct interface
- Minus the panoramas, the entire thing is barely more than a PDF.
But really, in the larger scheme of things, these are all relatively minor or at least entirely fixable issues - especially when compared to what I feel is the true problem with The Daily: It’s a product designed to answer NewsCorp’s problems, not their reader’s.
Who’s the Customer Here?
Every product is designed for the people who pay for it - which is, weirdly, why so many products are designed so poorly. The general assumption is that products are designed for the people who use them, but more often than not products are designed for everyone other than those people. In the case of news publishing, the customer is advertisers and the product is readers - not news. In this way, newspapers and magazines have historically been designed to deliver people to advertisers.
The trouble I think Murdoch has run into with The Daily is same thing I think many news organizations are facing: for the first time their product is news, not subscribers, and they have no idea how to design for that.
They’re going to have to sell a lot of that product too - according to Wired, The Daily will need get about 420,000 subscribers to plunk down $40 a month just to break even.
$.99
Which brings me first to the issue of price. Certainly $.99 is cheap in absolute terms, and it’s a price that people have been willing to pay for anything from iPhone apps to music to digital movie rentals. My guess is that this is how Murdoch is looking at it too - if people will buy those things, certainly they’ll buy his thing too. But getting people to pay even this tiny amount faces two hurdles. The first is that while I’ll pay $.99 for an app or song, those items remain just as valuable after a year as they did the day I bought them. News on the other hand isn’t worth very much even the next day, let alone a year from now. The second hurdle is simply that I can get news for free already.
And, as Chris Anderson points out in Free, there is a long, long way to go to get from $0 to even $.01.
The concept of easy micro payments has seemed to be held up as a gateway to profitability for publishers for a long time and like I said - $.99 is cheap, no doubt. But the very first hurdle I think news organizations will need to get over is not the space between 5 cents, or 99 cents or 5 dollars. It’s the space between 0 and something. They must first prove there is anything worth paying for at all - a completely new and foreign challenge to them. Once you can prove that there is a discrete, unique product, and that has a value to people then you can begin looking at what it should cost. Then you can start to talk about monthly subscriptions.
Welcome to the Newspaper of the 21st Century
So what is that value? Is The Daily worth more $.0? Does The Daily create value by bringing something to my iPad that nothing else does?
The answer is obviously no.
There has never been a time when has been easier for people to get to relevant information than right now - again most of it for free. Some of this is ad supported sure, but so is The Daily, and it costs me money. Worse though for The Daily - or any news publication - is that a lot of what people read every day isn’t ad supported, it’s just people producing and aggregating content every day because they love doing it. Murdoch has said that he’ll spend $500,000 a week to run The Daily, which might sound like a lot, until you consider that his competition isn’t any other news app, but Safari, and the nearly unlimited number of people creating content on the web all day, everyday, forever. Viewed through this lens, The Daily’s only hope of winning based on content value would be create purely original content of uniquely high quality that spoke to readers in a way no one else is. So far, they’re not even close.
So then, if the content isn’t unique, does The Daily bring it to me in more high quality way? As it stands, I’d say no. Sure, there are all the design and performance issues listed above - but there is something far worse going on with The Daily which is that I think their fundamental notion “high quality” is flawed. One thing that seems to be consistent across all the recent print publication apps is a strict adherence to the idea that what digital is missing is print. Or more specifically, print world aesthetics. In fact, in the opening pages of The Daily, they describe themselves as “The Newspaper of 21st Century” a statement I’d usually view as throwaway fluff but that in this case, I think it is actually how they see themselves - as finally bringing sensibilities of a newspaper to the untamed digital wilderness.
Instead, I’d say that “high quality” in the digital space is something entirely different, something that has less, or maybe nothing, to with the absolute material quality of site or app, and much more to do with how that thing expands the value of the content or people it’s connecting from the perspective of the reader.
In a time when information is faster, more connected and expansive than ever - The Daily seems to be taking a stand that information should be slower, less connected and more closed. In writing this article I have at least 10 browser windows open to articles about The Daily. Most of these were from links sent to me from friends, or that came across Twitter, or that I found in other articles. While this might be a nonstandard way of gathering info, it’s the nature of web for these bits of information and people to all be interlinked and available. The architecture of The Daily insists on operating entirely outside this ecosystem, I’m either in The Daily, or I’m out of it, a choice I believe goes back to a history of designing to deliver readers to advertisers.
This, I think, is the challenge for the The Daily, or any publication: to design a product that delivers some discreet, tangible value for their readers. Until they can do this, I think the questions about pricing or distribution models are irrelevant. It’s an unfamiliar problem for the news industry, and I for one have no idea what the answer is, or even if there is an answer.
