[NewsPoster]

News Corporation is shuttering its digital-only newspaper, The Daily, as part of the company's organizational changes. The date of its last publication, December 15th, will be just two months before the second anniversary of the iPad-only publication's creation. The primary motivation behind the closure has been revealed to be its unprofitability, caused through consistently low readership numbers.

Launched on December 9th in 2010, the iPad newspaper inaugurated in-app subscriptions in the App Store, though half a year on from launch, it had only received 120,000 weekly readers. Its reported burn-rate of $500,000 per week on dedicated operations needed more than half a million readers every week to stay afloat, which later forced News Corp to place The Daily "on watch" and to lay off a third of its staff in a cost-cutting measure. An iPhone version with a subscription of $20 per year, half that of the iPad app, was also launched but to no avail. In a statement picked up by Deadline, News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch called The Daily "a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation." Murdoch acknowledged the flagging readership as the app's downfall, but says the company will take what was learned from The Daily and will apply it to other publications. Some members of staff at The Daily will be moved to the New York Post, along with technology and other assets, though it is not clear what proportion of staff will be transferred instead of let go.

[Zanziboy]

Excellent. The articles in The Daily were simply Fox News re-runs with a few pop interest stories to hide its lousy articles.

[pairof9s]

I'm on the other side of the fence. I saw The Daily more as an USA Today-type news medium than a Fox News rehash. I enjoyed the light stories because of the limited reading time (commute) as well as the interactive aspects of various elements or issues (e.g. - US presidential debates & live response monitoring). I really wish it had succeeded just for the new manner in which it presented news and information. I'll still have my NYT, WSJ and Flipbook for the more heavy reading & editorials, but The Daily certainly had a niche I wish had been better received.

[Geoduck]

The end of the Mouth of Sauron.

Good Riddance.

[msuper69]

I deleted The Daily after I found out that it didn't save my place in the article I was reading the last time I used the app.
Fail.

[blahblahbber]

Excellent news about news corps hitting a low side. Smaller conglomerate status helps the 99% of us.

[gprovida]

I was an early subscriber and had it for about a year. Bottom line was the content was simply not that compelling and very politically biased. I have found USA today which is a pretty peer product is a lot more interesting and useful to me, in the US.

[mr100percent]

Quite a shame. Ordinarily I would have jumped at new media like this. The few articles and videos I saw that people shared from The Daily were high-quality and I wanted to see tablet magazines take off.

The real reason I refused to subscribe and many iPad early adopters left it alone was because it was part of Rupert Murdoc's empire. I don't want another Fox News sort of media source taking off. Had he sold it off to someone else, I would have subscribed today.