I'm not ready to call The Daily a failure.

It's a relatively easy conclusion to reach — when the last issue is published on Dec. 15, it won't even have two years in its archives —and many have given perfectly valid reasons to back up the claim. It was slow, content was weak, its audience was too small, its budget was too big, etc. 

When The Daily launched in February 2011, it had everyone's attention. At a very publicized event in New York City, Rupert Murdoch announced a venture to "give readers everywhere the engaging experience of a magazine combined with the need-to-know content of a newspaper and the immediacy of the Internet." 

Translation: A hard news publication with bold design and compelling articles that updated throughout the day. Few, if any, news outlets had figured out how to do this in 2011, but Murdoch seemed confident The Daily would succeed.

I've been working as a copy editor and page designer in the newspaper world for the better part of a decade, and have witnessed firsthand the gradual erosion of readership and profits you read about. It's clear that fewer people want a paper product these days, but still, those same papers have more readers than ever. They're just not paying anymore.

The Daily found 100,000 of them who were willing to fork over around a buck a week for a digital newspaper. Not too shabby for a barely two-year-old publication.

The problem, I believe, is that online newspapers are generally design disasters. Each of them has unique, engrossing articles that people should be reading, but navigation and formatting leave much to be desired. Newspapers put a lot of time and energy into their daily print editions, yet the corresponding website is often generated via scripts, late at night, when stories populate various sections of the site automatically, with little thought to font, headline size or photo placement, the hallmarks of any newspaper.

Even well-designed news aggregating apps like Flipboard or Pulse basically fill slots with stories. They look great and do a fantastic job of filtering content, but they don't give anything resembling the experience of a newspaper; that is, a lead story with sidebars and graphics, engaging layouts that draw the reader into a story they might otherwise skip.

That's what's missing from the web, and that's what I loved about The Daily: It truly felt like a 21st century newspaper. Instead of just another glossy receptacle for the news or a PDF representation of a paper publication, The Daily embraced the tablet as new way to design a newspaper.

There were plenty of web elements — interactive charts, comments, videos, photo galleries — but at its soul, it was a newspaper that just happened to be printed on a tablet. The cover was like any tabloid you would pick up at a newsstand, with a clever headline, a few teases and a dynamic photo (or more likely, a photo illustration) that playfully obscured part of the banner. Inside, stories were given proper importance, with bold layouts that took advantage of the iPad's remarkable display but stayed true to their roots. Even as graphics danced around the page, The Daily respected the "rules" of good newspaper design.

Lots of fantastic design-driven iOS publications have come along during The Daily's tenure, but none have matched The Daily's ambition. Murdoch's other NY publication, The New York Post, probably comes closest, but what The Daily tried to do might never be attempted again.

Newspapers are dying. But for 22 months, I enjoyed a bit of the old in a new way. It was exciting to think the iPad could revive the business I love — not just news gathering, but news presenting.

Maybe it didn't succeed. But that doesn't make it a failure.

Find Michael Simon on Twitter or App.net @morlium.