Slate’s Jacob Weisberg slams The Daily

Slate chairman Jacob Weisberg slammed Rupert Murdoch's new i-Pad-only newspaper The Daily in a lecture to j-students.

Slate chairman Jacob Weisberg slammed Rupert Murdoch's new i-Pad-only newspaper The Daily in a lecture to j-students.

WWD Media offers some quotes from Weisberg's speech, which he gave last week to a roomful of journalism students at Columbia University. “It represents everything that I hope you will steer clear of as journalists and people who think about news in relation to technology. I mean, first of all the content itself is very low-brow, facile, kind of USA Today, you know. It’s very attractive, but if you read the articles, they’re 600 words long and they sort of digest what you know already.

“It’s a daily, it’s once a day,” he continued. “They say they break in and update it for big news, but did they update it five times today to point out that [Egyptian president Hosni] Mubarak was going to resign though he didn’t in fact resign, what’s the response to that? No, they may have updated it at some point. It’s a digest, it doesn’t have an active relationship [with the news] that we’ve come to expect. There’s no commenting, no social media, no links out. ”

“It’s just a bad version of a newspaper in electronic form with a very condescending view of the audience.”

His advice to j-students and Daily editors alike? “Imagine your readers are as smart as you are.”