And with 100,000 subscribers paying 99 cents a week or $39.99 a year, and 250,000 unique readers each month, The Daily is on target to break even in five years, just short of the time it typically takes a new print magazine to see a profit, said its publisher, Greg Clayman.
But The Daily… has struggled to break into the national conversation or to drive news and build on its brand the way traditional outlets do. In part, The Daily has been limited by the structure of the app itself, which renders beautiful pages of text, photos and graphics but lacks the fluidity of the networked Web or the immediacy of blogs and Twitter. Editors might update the app once or twice a day, depending on news events. Critics immediately grumbled that The Daily seemed oddly static.
