Conde Nast digital chief: Murdoch’s iPad newspaper “doesn’t make any sense”

News Corp mogul Rupert Murdoch is making a big bet on the iPad by hiring big-name (read: expensive) reporters for a new “iPad newspaper” called The Daily. And other media organizations are skeptical.

For example, publisher Conde Nast has made a big deal about iPad versions of its magazines like Wired and the New Yorker, but when Conde Nast Digital president Sarah Chubb was asked about The Daily today at the Ignition conference, she said, “It doesn’t make any sense.”

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She noted that Conde Nast was able to revive Gourmet Magazine on the iPad, but that’s because Conde Nast only “put a little bit of money into Gourmet Live, and we’ve gotten our money back.”

Plus, Conde Nast can use the technology from the Gourmet app in other applications, so that investment will pay off elsewhere. The publisher will be unveiling more iPad-exclusive content next year, but it will probably migrate some of that content onto other platforms. The Daily, however, will have to be “one kick-ass newspaper” if it wants to make a profit, Chubb said.

Beyond the cost to News Corp, both Chubb and Kevin Krim, Bloomberg’s global head of web properties, pointed out another problem — news is a social experience. People want to share news and discuss it. That’s hard to do when all the article are locked in a single app on the iPad.

“It’s a newsletter, not a newspaper,” Krim said.