This is the entire front page of io9. It looks like a flag! Click to enlarge.
  • This is the entire front page of io9. It looks like a flag! Click to enlarge.
1. As Anthony Hecht pointed out already, Rupert Murdoch launched his iPad newspaper, The Daily, today.

(1b. Anthony Hecht clearly wakes up earlier than me.)

2. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong wants AOL media websites to start churning out a ridiculous amount of content. A leaked document explains:

By April, he wants AOL editorial to increase its stories per month from 33,000 to 55,000.
He wants pageviews per story to jump from 1,500 to 7,000.
He wants video stories to go from being 4% of all stories produced to 70%.
He wants the percentage of stories optimized for search engines to reach 95%.

In response to this news, an anonymous AOL employee tells Business Insider that ""AOL is the most f——-up, bull—-t company on earth."

3. Gawker CEO Nick Denton is unveiling the new clean design for his sites, telling The Observer that the only social media that matters is Facebook. The Gawker mothership site hasn't changed yet, but io9 has. Basically, there's one gigantic story to the left, with the blog reduced to a tiny collection of headlines to the right (click on the thumbnail on the left to see a screenshot of the entire front page). Gawker would like you to "flip" through the site using your arrow keys. Of course, this way of browsing io9 would greatly increase pageviews, allowing Gawker to charge advertisers more.

4. My take, in order: I like the look of The Daily. I really like that it doesn't look like a print newspaper. I question Murdoch's ability to keep it running on just one single platform, especially since the profile of so many Apple users—white, relatively affluent, relatively young, urban—is conscious of Murdoch's relationship with Fox News and so are wary of his other endeavors. AOL is just as ridiculous today as it was two years ago. And while I think Denton has the right idea in spotlighting specific content and fighting the bottomless pit design of blogs, the new layout is horrible and it diminishes the blog. In an ideal world, blogs would have real-time content designers on staff to lay out the blog in a visually pleasing way, with important content at the top and other information arrayed all the way down the site. This redesign is certainly not that.