I know I only tried out the Magazine because it was so simple to subscribe - and just as importantly, I knew how easy it would be to cancel if I didn't like it.
I never read the Daily, but apart from the Magazine, all the Newsstand apps I've tried have been utter crap.
Of course that demographic is going to disappear and all huge newspapers have financial problems at the moment. But for example the NewYork Times web subscription has >500.000 paying subscribers... I don't know, paying 30% to apple for a better payment gateway seems just excessive to me.
From a purely economical perspective, this is a very good point....
The best thing I can say in The Daily's favor is that the app took advantage of the native frameworks for kerning and text layout, even if the hyphenation was screwed up.
For an app like The Daily to take better advantage of being a native app, there'd have be better tools available to content creators so that they can actually use those features. Camera input. Keyframe animations. Multitrack audio. Even, dare I say it, 3D content.
Because the population of people buying a yearly subscription to a newspaper is quite special to begin with - if you are counting on the increased publicity by being in the app store to sell subscriptions, I think you are doing something wrong.
Of course The Daily probably made mistakes as well. But I'm very sure that the succesful models of the future will neither be Ipad only nor giving up 30% to Apple without adding much value to the customer in doing so...