The Daily Beast | Gizmodo
You might think you’ve read enough about The Daily’s demise — our analysis, others’ analysis and then the analysis of the analysis. But Michael Moynihan puts a nice bow on the story with a good “view from inside the collapse.”
The Daily Beast writer interviewed six of the iPad news publication’s laid-off employees. One big revelation: There’s a lot more of them than previously thought.
News Corp. initially said “technology and other assets from The Daily, including some staff, will be folded into The Post.” Moynihan reports only two editorial staffers have been retained by the Post so far: editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo and gossip columnist Richard Johnson.
One senior staffer also said the News of the World scandal and News Corp. restructuring led News Corp. to pull the plug much sooner than it had promised. And a former editor said the “whole staff wanted a web presence,” but upper management resisted.
More on that sentiment comes from another insider’s tale, from Peter Ha, the tech editor and Employee No. 19. On Gizmodo, Ha writes:
We collectively broke a lot of stories, like the existence of Amazon lockers, Office for iPad, Xbox set-top boxes and other notable stories from the news and gossip desks. You probably read about them on various Gawker sites. Great content doesn’t do much good if there’s no good way to share it. The Daily was run like a newspaper from the top down, which isn’t a terrible idea. It just needed to go back a few more decades to a time when newspapers published multiple editions in a day, for instance. …
The Daily had every chance of flourishing and succeeding, but operating independently of the Internet as a whole was clearly a huge mistake.
Related: 2 major lessons from The Daily’s demise | Jordan Kurzweil says he tried to buy The Daily and had a plan to save it (Giga OM) | The wider fallout across News Corp. from the split (Newsonomics) | Marco Arment: The Daily had middling content and too large a staff (Marco.org) | Jon Gruber has similar takeaways: Don’t suck, and start small (Daring Fireball).
