India Today flagship DailyO, which was an opinion-based website that provided commentary on news from various categories like politics, sports, life, sci-tech, money, humour and art & culture seems to have folded its operations.
Launched in 2014, DailyO was supposed to be in direct competition with the Reliance website FirstPost in providing opinions and views from all corners of the ideological spectrum. It was rumoured that the website was inspired by Medium, a collaborative publishing portal. It features a similar distraction-free reading interface for articles along with the time duration one would require to read any specific article. One can also sign in with their Twitter credentials to add paragraph annotations.
Much to everyone’s surprise, DailyO abruptly stopped publishing any new articles yesterday. Their social media account also lay dormant when news started trickling in that the website had decided to fold operations.
OpIndia reached out to a member of the Editorial Staff who was also laid off recently. According to her, the website has folded operations because it wasn’t doing as well as expected.
The website DailyO functioned on a massive budget and according to our source, who wishes to stay anonymous, the hits the website was garnering was not doing justice to the budget it guzzled.
According to the member of the editorial staff, about 6 months ago, the Editorial team was asked to pull up their socks and try to introduce features that are not being covered by any other website. However, it is said that the team had no intimation that failing to revamp the website would lead to its closure only 6 months down the line.
According to information, the entire editorial staff was asked to resign yesterday and have been given 2 months to look for an alternate job. The staff was told that the while the website would exist and the older articles already published would continue to reflect, further operations have been shut down.
The media industry is going through a massive churn in recent times. Scroll recently fired several of its Editorial team members because the ‘current financial situation’ did not allow them to maintain the size of their operation. Kapil Sibal owned Tiranga TV too fired all its employees overnight without giving them any compensation. This was touted to be a breach of the agreement by senior members like Barkha Dutt.
Update: The website, dailyo.com is back and operational.
