News Corp to launch first iPad only newspaper
Perhaps Rupert Murdoch does know how to use his ‘game-changing’ iPad after all… the saviour of paid-content is set to launch The Daily, a newspaper that has been designed especially for the iPad.
Murdoch has been “dreaming about ‘hundreds and hundreds of millions’ of iPads or similar tablet devices out there. Why, argued Murdoch, we’ll even have young people reading newspapers, albeit electronically,” Newsline columnist Raymond Snoddy wrote in September.
And now he seems to be doing exactly that. With an investment of $30 million and staff of around 100, The Daily will be the first of a kind – incorporating some content from the rest of Murdoch’s News Corporation empire. Fox Sports will be providing some video content, although the majority of content is rumoured to be original.
Speaking earlier this week, Murdoch said The Daily was his “number one most exciting project”, while his son James called it the company’s “flagship project”.
However, some commentators are less than convinced. “Leaving aside some elephant-size editorial questions – how do you put out an original national newspaper every day with a staff of only 100?” The New York Times said.
“Mr Murdoch’s view that Steven Jobs’s device is some kind of magical kingdom for news is up against some hard realities. As innovative as it seems, The Daily will be a newspaper, an ancient motif on a modern device. It will be produced into the evening, and then a button will be pushed and it will be ‘printed’ for the next morning. There will be updates – the number of which is still under discussion – but not at the velocity or with the urgency of a news website. And at a time when the ecosystem of news is driven by links, The Daily will have no inbound links from other sites, and nothing outbound either.”
Reportedly, Murdoch is hoping to attract half a million subscribers in the first five years, which would equate to 5% of all current tablets users. The New York Times calls this “wildly optimistic” but given that the tablet market is expected to grow substantially, and given Murdoch’s general success in the market (and ability to pump in a significant amount of investment), it may surprise people, possibly.
According to Beehivecity.com, it “will cost punters 99 cents (that’s 62p) a week” and will be launched in the coming month. “iPads are popular. News is popular. Why not combine the two?… Erm, I don’t think so,” says Tim Glanfield, before stating several reasons why Murdoch might not have mastered the digital news model just yet!