HuffPo, Daily’s iPad-only mags falter

As news surfaced that two high-profile iPad-only magazines are faltering, the big question arose: Is there a future for paid tablet-only magazines? First, News Corp.‘s The Daily announced that it was laying off 50 staffers and dropping its opinion section completely. And for its sports section, it will rely on content from its sister site, Fox Sports. Then, the HuffPo magazine, which launched with much fanfare just this past June, announced that it will now be free – the assumption among media watchers being that people just weren’t willing to pay for it. A spokesman wrote in an email to Mashable, “In the end, we felt that asking people to pay for the magazine was inconsistent with the Huffington Post itself, which has never charged for content.” But, as Capital New York’s Joe Pompeo points out, the magazine’s editor Tim O’Brien had told reporters at the launch that, “We feel it’s a premium product and it deserves to carry a price with it in order to access all the value we’re giving people.”

GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram summed up the two announcements this way, “I think dedicated magazine or even newspaper apps in many cases don’t jibe with the way that increasing numbers of people consume content…Much of the news and other content we consume now comes via links shared through Twitter and Facebook and other networks, or through old-fashioned aggregators — such as Yahoo News or Google News — and newer ones like Flipboard and Zite and Prismatic.” But, Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman doesn’t see it that way. He writes, “Multiple-source aggregators seem an important part of today’s diverse content economy, but not to the exclusion of single-source apps.” His summary is, “The renewed question of what readers are willing to pay for, though, seems to be the bigger issue.”

• HuffPo, The Daily and the flawed iPad content model (GigaOm)

• Huffington iPad mag stops charging, renewing concerns about willingness to pay (Poynter)

• The Daily Lays Off a Third of Its Staff (AllThingsD)

• The Daily is laying off 50 employees, yanking some original content (PaidContent)

• Huffington’ iPad Magazine Goes Free (Mashable)

• Huffington makes her tablet magazine free after five issues (Capital New York)

• The Daily Axes 50 Staffers, Drops Opinion Section and Outsources Sports (AdAge)