Commentary

The Daily Meets Reality

The-daily-app

A week after its high-toned unveiling at The Guggenheim in New York, The Daily has come back to earth in the appraisal of the broader marketplace. In the hours after News Corp.'s iPad newspaper hit the iTunes App Store, early reviewers had rated it 4.5 out of five stars and posted enthusiastic reviews of the tablet aiming to save the moribund newspaper industry.

But with a more representative sampling of 4,475 ratings as of today, The Daily's rating is down to three stars overall, and 2.5 stars for an updated version introduced Tuesday that promises "increased performance and stability" and updated Twitter posting, among other things.

Shouldn't the improved version rate higher? Not necessarily."Epic Fail--Update is Even Worse," wrote one commenter on The Daily's app page. An abundance of other one-star reviews offered similar complaints about its sluggish or buggy performance, noting frequent crashes. "This app should be called 'Evel Knievel' because it crashes so much," quipped reviewer Patrick Gramling in one post.

Ratings so far seem to be at the extremes--either one-star or four or five stars, hence the overall rating winding up somewhere in the middle. "It is convenient having all the typical sections of a newspaper so easily accessible. Hopefully the articles stay current and the bias stays on the opinion page," stated one four-star review.

But even people giving The Daily higher ratings noted its technical problems. "Still kind of slow, but consider[ing] the heavy multimedia inside every issue, I would not complain too much," noted a commenter going by "peter1002." Indeed, News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch and other company executives touted the app's 360-degree photography and HD-quality video during the launch last Wednesday.

"Simply put, the iPad demands we reimagine our craft," said Murdoch. Actually delivering a multimedia daily newspaper seamlessly in touchscreen tablet is another matter. For News Corp., the "reimagining" is likely to go on for some time. But with the company charging 99 cents a week or $39.99 a year for The Daily, users aren't going to have much patience for a product that doesn't work smoothly or easily when other free options are a click away.

At The Daily launch, Apple executive Eddy Cue pointed out the App Store has more than 9,000 news apps already. More and more will expand from the iPhone to the iPad and other tablets over time. If people find The Daily is more of a hassle to use than it's worth, it'll become just another title adrift in a sea of apps.

1 comment about "The Daily Meets Reality ".
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  1. Howard Zoss from Zig Marketing, February 9, 2011 at 5:48 p.m.

    The daily will be a huge failure .. Why pay for what most get for free ... The only leveragable element is usability .., faster, better organized ... Fails miserably ... Built by tech guys ... Murdoch needs to go out to the pasture ... If I dis not know better I would say the design came out of Redmond . ... Clueless

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