Rupert Murdoch shuttered The Daily yesterday, the iPad only newspaper with a staff of a 100 or something like that. Quite an operation, quite a project, and quite a project propelled by the dreams of an old media publisher and their hopes of doing the same old thing on a new media format such as an iPad. No wonder it failed, right?
The iPad magazine business, if we can call it that, is in an interesting spot right now. To understand this, it is important to remember where it all started, with bloated versions of paper magazines, more or less behaving like an interactive PDF really. Not only did the format, with its “tap to view video” and similar, not engage readers as much as magazine makers might’ve thought, it also meant huge file sizes for every issue. The weight issue has been handled somewhat, but magazines clock in at over 150 MB more often than not.