Edward Helmore reporting Guardian:

Rupert Murdoch, head of the media giant News Corp, and Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, are preparing to unveil a new digital “newspaper” called the Daily at the end of this month, according to reports in the US media.

The Daily would be delivered to an iPad or similar device automatically, similar to Amazon’s newspaper offerings through the Kindle.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any faith that a service like this will succeed. People don’t read newspapers like they used to and giving it to them on an iPad won’t change that. What big newspaper companies like News Corp need to realize is that big newspaper companies aren’t going to be a viable business in the not-to-distant future. The only way I can see these companies succeeding is to spend more money on writing content and less time trying to sell ads. If you have good content you’ll get more visitors and advertising money will follow.

What everyone (especially those in the newspaper industry) want to ignore is that the product isn’t good anymore. It’s rare to find a well written newspaper article and even harder to find a well written, heavily researched newspaper article. I may be looking in all the wrong places but they all just seem very cookie-cutter, no personality and no specialty. It’s almost as if the same people who write about the tech industry also write about cooking.

I could be wrong. And if so, I’m prepared to eat my words. But, I don’t think that the Daily will be the newspaper industries saving grace. That is, unless users are able to choose what types of content they’re interested in and only receive articles in those categories. And, it wouldn’t hurt to put some top-notch writers behind this as well.

In a nutshell, I’m worried that the Daily is being conceived and developed as a means of displaying advertising rather than displaying well written news.