From left: News Chairman Jon Miller, Cue, Murdoch, Angelo. Photo: PED
FORTUNE — News Corp. (NWS) announced Monday that The Daily — the iPad-only publication launched with great fanfare by Rupert Murdoch with the encouragement of Apple’s (AAPL) Steve Jobs (and a little speech by Senior VP Eddy Cue) — will “cease standalone publication” on Dec. 15, one month short of its second birthday.
An unspecified number of the 120 staff that remain (one third of the staff was laid off last summer) will be “folded into” The New York Post. Editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo, will become the newspaper’s publisher.
We hate to say we told you so, or to dance on anyone’s grave, but here’s what we wrote after spending 45-minutes reading the premier issue on the subway home from the launch event:
The lead stories — the Cairo protests and winter snowstorm — read like pieces dashed off by one-man bureaus and can’t compete with, say, the New York Times, memeorandum or the Weather Channel. There are plenty of cheesecake celebrity photos, but they’re not going to turn the heads of kids raised on Internet porn. The only bite I could find in the copy was at the end of Richard (Page Six) Johnson’s gossip section, which treats readers to blind items like this one:
“Which hard-partying, hot mess of a premium cable actress recently learned she is pregnant? No one knows who the dad is — not even the knocked up actress…”
Spare me, please.
See The Daily: Live from the Guggenheim and Will Murdoch’s Daily ever break even?