Sad days for the newspaper industry come with news of the death of Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, and of the closure of US iPad newspaper The Daily.

In Australia, Dame Elisabeth was an inspiration to many… not least her son. She will be sadly missed.

Rupert Murdoch’s decision to cut losses on The Daily will also be greeted with dismay in the industry. Not unexpected, but nonetheless sad.

In a fast-moving online publishing environment, the iPad-only edition sought new ground, yet failed to find enough support to match its considerable costs. Staff had been cut earlier and WAN-Ifra’s resident tablet publishing expert Stig Nordqvist – who visited the Daily office recently – reported to the Digital Media Asia conference that those remaining were expecting the publication would be closed.

Elements from it will be absorbed into the New York Post, and knowledge gained shared within the whole of News Corp. Lessons from the project will help all in the global news publishing industry form strategies for the future.

Like many in the industry, I downloaded the app in its early days to see what ‘state of the art’ tablet publishing looked like, but found it less than compelling. Its format was just one of many now available, and will now come under scrutiny.

The biggest shame of all is that a business could not be built on a reported 100,000 subscribers and the interactions they generated.

• News is also in the news today with details of the new global publishing business, which will still be called News Corporation and will derive an estimated 24 per cent of its revenue from Australian operations.

Much nonsense is spoken and written about the value and future of the newspaper industry, but the fact remains that these are good businesses and the demise of The Daily is only part – albeit an expensive part – of an ongoing learning processes. Those in the magazine segment especially are accustomed to tossing new publishing ideas into the market in the expectation that many will fall to the ground.

And talking of nonsense, what of the Mumbrella report that News might buy Fairfax Media’s Tullamarine print site in Melbourne instead of upgrading its Westgate Park presses? We think it unlikely for several reasons:

• Apart from their increased colour capacity, the presses are fundamentally similar to those News has in the city;

• They lack the control sophistication which is central to the upgrades being undertaken in Sydney, Brisbane and Townsville;

• Neither party has much of a track record in accommodating the other… for good competitive reasons.

However, if the plant is big enough – which is another question – we expect News could make a success of it, overcoming core industrial issues which are thought to be at least partly behind Fairfax’s decision to move out.

Peter Coleman