The Daily Debuts

but it will be a long time before I actually see it. That doesn't mean I won't comment, though.
The newspaper industry seems to be rooting for this one. Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp is charging something like a buck a week for a subscription to this IPad only product, becoming the first to seize the do-over that the tablet computer moment seems to be granting to news organizations. All of em blew the first chance to get the digital age right.
Murdoch et al. have gotten one element right this time. They have colluded with the company that controls a key bottleneck. According to an anonymous source quoted in today's NYTimes,

The News Corporation agreed last year to make Fox programs available on Apple TV for 99 cents, making it the only network other than ABC to do so. Apple in turn agreed to throw its considerable muscle behind The Daily, this person said. Mr. Jobs said he would appear at the debut event alongside Mr. Murdoch, but Mr. Jobs was absent, having recently taken a medical leave from Apple.

Sounds like a handshake deal among robber barons, or titans of industry, or some other nineteenth-century set of personages. Leave the personages aside, though, and the industrial logic is clear. In the age of the newspaper, economies of scale in print technology and urban advertising let dailies become monopolies and then control the flow of every sort of intelligence: financial information, classified advertising, political reporting, sports news. In the digital media environment, economies of scale have created similar concentrations of power at other points: the browser, the operating system, the I-whatever. If a news organization is going to make money in digital land, it will have to partner with Google or Microsoft or Apple. That's simple math.

But Apple and Rupert? That's non-Euclidian geometry. You just can't picture it. The more I try, the more I root against it.