新闻集团（News Corp.）本周一宣布，公司旗下仅在iPad上发行的出版物The Daily将于12月15日——创刊两周年前一个月——“停止独立出版”。这份电子日报创办之时曾得到鲁伯特•默多克大肆宣传，并获得苹果（Apple）前首席执行官史蒂夫•乔布斯的鼓励，苹果公司高级副总裁埃迪•库还就此做了简短的演讲。

    这份电子刊物现有的120名工作人员（去年曾有三分之一的员工被裁）中将有若干人“并入”《纽约邮报》（The New York Post）。The Daily的总编辑杰西•安格鲁将担任《纽约邮报》的出版人。

    我们不愿放马后炮，也无意落井下石。但早在两年前，我们从The Daily的发布会出来后，在回家的地铁上拿着它的创刊号看了45分钟。随后，我们写下了下面这段话：

    头条新闻——开罗抗议和冬季暴风雪——读起来像是单枪匹马、匆忙拼凑出来的稿件，无法与《纽约时报》（New York Times）、政治新闻聚合类网站memeorandum或是天气频道竞争。它上面倒是有很多名人的半裸照片，但对于见惯了网络色情的孩子们来说，这些完全没有吸引力。整份报纸中，唯一有点刺激的是理查德•约翰逊的八卦专栏（第6版）在结尾的地方含糊其辞、捕风捉影的写到：

    “哪位热衷派对、生活一团糟的一线电视女演员最近得知自己怀孕的消息了？没人知道孩子的爹是谁？就连这个女演员自己都不知道……”

    天啊，饶了我吧。

    译者：项航

    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.