It was a rough start this week for Women’s Wear Daily as it abandoned its daily print edition and began sending out its new five-days-a-week digital daily.
Ironically, dropping the print version came the same day that fashion boldface names were gathering to eulogize Fairchild founder John Fairchild at a memorial service.
As the accolades for Fairchild rolled on, readers were reporting problems opening and scrolling through their digital WWD.
A WWD spokeswoman said, “While launching our Digital Daily PDF there were a few technical glitches for those readers on iOS Apple mobile devices who had trouble opening the issue. We immediately addressed this and our team resolved the problem for day two.”
One insider conceded, “Day one was rough.” Somewhere between 3,000 and 3,500 readers out of roughly 28,000 subscribers could not open their copies on Monday, one source said.
While WWD claimed the glitches were fixed by Tuesday, one subscriber told Media Ink that simply wasn’t true.
“They’re lying,” the subscriber said bluntly on Tuesday. “It’s still locked. My personal account, which was a paper account, has clearly not been converted to digital.” She also said she was reading it on a PC — not an iPhone or other mobile device.
The WWD consumer hotline on Tuesday promised readers the company was “aware of the problem” and was working toward a solution.
The conversion to a weekly glossy print edition is apparently going a lot smoother.
The new glossy weekly debuts Wednesday with a triple gatefold cover andmore than 110 ad pages in a 300-page issue.