Murdoch kills The Daily

Many suspected two years ago that the iPad-only publication was dead on arrival

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?

Posted in: Apple, Eddy Cue, News Corp., Rupert Murdoch, Steve Jobs

• A video preview of iTunes 11

  Scheduled for release in October, it's reportedly due out today (Thursday)

  FORTUNE -- One of the tentpole presentations of Apple's (AAPL) Sept. 12 iPhone 5 event was a demo of the eleventh major revision of iTunes, the company's much-used and not-much-loved application for serving up music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, books, apps, ring tones, radio and who knows what else.

  (Anil Dash's quip that "Apple should put someone in charge of iTunes so they MORE

  Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Nov 29, 2012 7:01 AM ET
  Posted in: Apple, Eddy Cue, iTunes 11, Preview, Video

• Clear the courtroom before Steve Jobs' deposition is read

  Why is Apple fighting so hard to keep two-year-old court records sealed?

  FORTUNE -- The first thing you learned when you sat down with Steve Jobs was that the interview was off the record. And it stayed off the record. No matter how innocuous the quote, no matter how much time had passed, Apple (AAPL) public relations wouldn't let you use it.

  So it doesn't surprise me to learn from a story MORE

  Philip Elmer-DeWitt - May 1, 2012 6:39 AM ET
  Posted in: Apple, Eddy Cue, Emminem, Hollywood Reporter, iTunes, Music, Rick James, Steve Job, Universal Music Group

• Who dropped the dime on the Apple e-book five?

  Decoding the Department of Justice's antitrust whodunnit

  FORTUNE -- At a hearing in a Manhattan federal court Wednesday, attorneys for Apple (AAPL) and two major book publishers said that rather than settling -- as three of their co-defendants had -- they wanted to go to trial to defend themselves against U.S. government charges that they had colluded illegally to raise e-book prices. (See The Apple e-book conspiracy: Three days in January.)

  Which means MORE

  Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Apr 19, 2012 3:16 PM ET
  Posted in: Amazon, Antitrust, Apple, Barnes & Noble, e-books, Eddy Cue, Hachette, Justice Department, Markus Dohle, Publishing, Random House, Steve Jobs

• Steve Jobs gets his Grammy

  "We love music, and it's always good to do something you love."

  Accepting the honorary award -- Steve Jobs' second Grammy -- on behalf of his wife, children and "everyone at Apple" (AAPL), senior vice president for Internet software and services, Eddy Cue.

  Via Macrumors.

  Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Feb 12, 2012 2:23 PM ET
  Posted in: Apple, Eddy Cue, Grammy Award, Laurene Powers, Steve Jobs

• An Apple TV set in 2012?

  The hardware is the easy part. The trick is to get Hollywood on board

  "Apple enters markets to reinvent them," wrote Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster in a note to clients Tuesday reiterating his oft-repeated conviction that Apple's (AAPL) next big thing is an Apple-branded television set.

  To be sure, Munster has scaled back his expectations since he predicted that the company would sell 6.6 million Apple TV set-top boxes in 2009 and MORE

  Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Feb 1, 2012 7:02 AM ET
  Posted in: Apple, Eddy Cue, Hollywood, iPhone, iTunes, Piper Jaffray, Steve Jobs, television, Television set, Tim Cook

• Live from Apple's education event at the Guggenheim

  New tools and platforms for replacing today's paper textbooks with iPads

  Apple (AAPL) on Thursday introduced three new inititatives by which it hopes to "reinvent the textbook" around the iPad:

  iBooks 2, a new iPad app and reading tool offering searchable, interactive, updatable  textbooks filled with as many videos, photo galleries, glossaries and study guides as publishers choose to throw in
  iTunes author, a Mac app with an array of tools for creating MORE

  Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Jan 19, 2012 9:57 AM ET
  Posted in: Apple, E.O. Wilson, Eddy Cue, Education, iBooks 2, iTunes Author, iTunes U, McGraw-Hill, Phil Schiller, Roger Rosner, Textbooks

• Rethinking Apple's org chart

  It was a wheel that revolved around Steve Jobs. How will it change under Tim Cook?

  One of my favorite elements in Adam Lashinsky's How Apple Works -- the "inside" story that created a sensation when it appeared in the May 23 issue of Fortune but was made fully available online only last week -- was the organization chart assembled by Fortune's graphics team under the guidance of senior research editor Doris MORE

  Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Aug 29, 2011 7:51 AM ET
  Posted in: Adam Lashinsky, Apple, CEO, COO, Doris Burke, Eddy Cue, Jonathan Ive, Organization chart, Phil Schiller, Ron Johnson, Scott Forestall, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook

• 6 things I never knew about Apple

  Adam Lashinsky's "Inside" story in the new issue of Fortune is packed with juicy revelations

  After the simultaneous, and more-or-less disastrous, launch of the iPhone 3G and MobileMe in the summer of 2008 -- the launch one Gizmodo reader dubbed "iPocalypse" -- Steve Jobs summoned the MobileMe team to the Town Hall auditorium on Apple's (AAPL) Cupertino campus for an obscenity-laden dressing down. "You've tarnished Apple's reputation," he told them. "You MORE

  Philip Elmer-DeWitt - May 7, 2011 9:30 AM ET
  Posted in: Adam Lashinsky, Apple, Eddy Cue, Fortune, iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPocalypse, iTunes, Jony Ive, MobileMe, Phil Schiller, Scott Forstall, Steve Jobs

• Katy Huberty visits Apple

  Leaves meeting with three top execs with "increasing confidence" in a $540 price target

  Katheryn ("Katy") Huberty, Morgan Stanley's chief Apple analyst, met recently with three of Steve Jobs' top lieutenants: Peter Oppenheimer, the money man; Ron Johnson, the former Target exec who built the Apple Stores; and Eddy Cue, the senior vice president in charge of Internet services.

  Apparently no company secrets were revealed. The Apple execs would not confirm that MORE

  Philip Elmer-DeWitt - May 5, 2011 5:48 AM ET
  Posted in: Apple, Eddy Cue, iPad, iPhone, Mobile, Morgan Stanley, PCs, Peter Oppenheimer, Ron Johnson, Steve Jobs, Tablets