Simon Dumenco

While plenty of critics piled on iPad newspaper The Daily within hours of its launch on Feb. 2, I held off because I wanted to give it a fair shot by really living with it for a while. Now, with more than a month of daily Daily reading behind me, I've got some unsolicited advice for the team behind News Corp.'s experiment in tablet publishing:

1. TWITTER IS FOR TWEETS; NEWSPAPERS ARE (THEORETICALLY) FOR DEPTH
In trying to be all brisk and app-y, The Daily often goes short -- too short. On Ronald Reagan's centenary birthday, for instance, it offered a full-page shot of him headlined "100 FOR THE GIPPER" followed by a three-sentence (total) "article" about the "bipartisan hero" (hmmm). A full-page shot of a bowl of shark-fin soup ("A FIN MESS" -- groan) topped a four-sentence (total) "article" about a proposed California ban. Elsewhere, page-hogging infographics aren't much different from what USA Today pioneered back in 1982, while gratuitously deployed video demonstrates that sometimes pictures can be worth way less than 1,000 words.

The other day during a Daily reading session at my neighborhood McDonald's (Dollar Menu coffee plus free Wi-Fi), the manager stopped by my table to tell me how much he loves his iPad. Turns out he's a Daily reader, so I asked his take on it. "A lot of times," he told me, "I'll read something in The Daily that I already read about the day before, but The Daily version I'll read and go, 'Hey, they're missing a lot of the story here.'" He's still in his free trial period, and says he's unlikely to pay for it. Why? "It's just really not that good," he said, laughing. This from a guy who peddles crap food!

via adage.com