The Daily: Going through the motions

It's been nearly three weeks since my "Five days of The Daily" post, in which I expressed mostly admiration for The Daily and where I thought it should go. 

Sadly, I feel like all that hope has evaporated. I feel like The Daily is going through the motions, hitting singles instead of triples and home runs. I find myself coming back to one question: What are they spending $500,000 per week on?

In the week or so after my initial post, The Daily seemed to believe in itself, tackling multi-part series on meaty subjects like education reform and a very good profile of a badly wounded U.S. serviceman who was voluntarily returning to the front lines. The reporting was good, the digital elements like video, extra photos and charts were good. Things were humming. Confidence was in the air. 

I love a fun headline as much as anyone, but the juvenile quotient has been growing in recent weeks.Then the bottom seemed to fall out. Coverage since devolved to little more than your normal metro tabloid, with big cheesy headlines (example at right), easy potshots, and goofy packaging of silly stories between serious news packages. I can't remember a recent story with a "Daily exclusive" label. Even the sports coverage, where it's really hard for journalist to be lifeless, is just that. This product seems just that: a "product" without any fight.

Couple other things I've noticed recently:

• After my initial post, there were two days where I was unable to download The Daily, either at work or at home. That issue hasn't recurred over the last 10 days, which is good, but if I'm paying for the product, it needs to be reliable. 
• In my original post, I bemoaned the lack of off-app links. Within a day or two, The Daily suddenly introduced a daily What We're Reading box to things off the app. I wouldn't dare suggest they got the idea from me, but I like it. And mad props for using one of those off-app links to 4chan,  a site objectionable to many but newsworthy nonetheless. 
• The Daily's explanatory graphics are often excellent. Let's see more!There have been some terrific graphics. They need to do more in this area because explanatory graphics work well on a tablet platform. 
• Someone putting together the Gossip pages needs to actually try reading the content on an iPad. The white on black type is unreadable and images often surface without any related explanatory text. 
• The Daily has clearly taken an anti-union stance in its news coverage of the Wisconsin state budget issue. Given Murdoch's history, the anti-union stance wouldn't be a surprise editorially but there's no question this digital tabloid, newswise or editorially, is not the voice of blue-collar folks. 
• There continues to be lots of video with mostly decent content, but the playback is often pixelated throughout, or at least for the first third. And this is at a small viewing window and on connections at various locations. This is a Daily problem, not mine. 

At least one Gossip story per day is unreadable, either because of rending issues or silly use of white on black type. Stop!When my free introductory subscription expired over the weekend, I subscribed for a week, for 99 cents. But at this point that whopping 99 cents is as much for the interactive sudoku game as any inspiring or interesting coverage from the $500,000 being spent each week to produce The Daily. 

And, interestingly, when I was asked to subscribe, I was given only the option to go week to week, at 99 cents per. No annual subscription, previously announced at $40, was presented. Hmmm. Let's hope that's because of back-end billing challenges and not a decision to operate week to week. 

So, here you have me, a once Daily fanboy, questioning even 99 cents a week for a product that's OK, sometimes good, but never great. For a half-million per week, I expect more, and I 'll be surprised if The Daily hits its first anniversary, even with expected increases in iPad sales and the introduction of an Android version of the app. 

There has been previous discussion about the subscriber numbers required to recoup ongoing costs and The Daily isn't close to being the product it needs to be to gain that large readership.  

Here's an idea: Instead of spending $500,000 per week on what to date has been mostly generic content, spend $3 million PER YEAR on 21 really good columnists who do actual reporting and stop trying to be all things to all people.  That's $142,000 per year for each, not a bad salary for a top-notch journalist writing one knockout column per week, plus a companion notes-style blog. Build and curate a community around the inevitable conversations on big-picture topics. 

Keep your price at 99 cents per week, which buys a reader three home-run packages per day so there's a bit of diversity in content. 

Now your economics change. At that budget, my math shows you need about 59,000 subscribers paying 99 cents per week for 52 weeks or 75,000 paying a $40 annual fee. That's still a tough number to hit but seems more realistic to me. 

When sudoku is your big selling point, big change needs to come fast.