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News Corp set to launch ‘The Daily’ iPad newspaper

by Scott Bicheno on 22 November 2010, 09:59

Tags: News Corp (NASDAQ:NWS)

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Kryptonite

This one has been brewing for a few months, but with various major publications jumping on the story this weekend it's getting as close to official as you can without actually troubling the press officers.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is apparently putting the pieces in place to launch a major new newspaper - one that will be published exclusively on the iPad. Murdoch made it clear over a year ago that he thinks subscriptions are the way forward, with advertisers increasingly hard to come by. Since then he has made the online versions of UK papers like The Times and The News of the World subscription only.

A year later the FT reported that News Corp was near to a decision on whether to launch a tablet-only news organisation, which the LA Times appeared to confirm had received the green light a couple of weeks later. Then, last Thursday, WWD (Women's Wear Daily!) appeared to have inside information - including what Murdoch gets up to at 2am - which catalysed the flood of semi-speculative reports we saw this weekend.

Here's was it all comes down to: the publication will be called The Daily. It will derive some content from other parts of News Corp, but there will be a team of around 100 journalists generating content exclusively for The Daily. The tone of the writing will be populist, but informed, presumably like The Sun.

The Daily will launch exclusively, initially, on the iPad and Steve Jobs has apparently got all excited about it. It will effectively be an app that pushes new edition of the publication once per day. It will be US-focused and cost 99 cents per week for a subscription.

Our view is that it's a promising idea and that the rest of the media world should be grateful to Murdoch for trying to innovate out of the advertising death-spiral it's currently in. However there are a couple of reasons why we think The Daily will struggle and they're both to do with the news media environment it's trying to revolutionise.

The biggest one is immediacy. How can a daily publication possibly compete with the 24/7 immediacy of the online news environment? Why would people pay for content that they could have got the equivalent of for free up to a day earlier?

The second is the issue that always arises when discussing the online subscription model: why would people pay for something they can get for free elsewhere? The Daily needs to create sufficient unique, desirable content to answer this question. Also there's the matter of Google; presumably this massive traffic driver will be of no assistance to The Daily.

Regardless, this will be an interesting and potentially pivotal media experiment at a time of great change in the way people consume their news. With tablets rapidly emerging as the antidote to watching rubbish TV, they are likely to be a major new source of eyeballs, and News Corp is leading the charge to grab them.

 



HEXUS Forums :: 6 Comments

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They do realise that these devices have a web browser, right?
aidanjt
They do realise that these devices have a web browser, right?

I can see a place for locally stored news - e.g. reading on the tube.
aidanjt
They do realise that these devices have a web browser, right?
Yes, but aren't you limited in what you can do with a web browser (especially an Apple one - no Flash). Whereas if you have a proper app then not only can you easily lock it down so that only approved platforms access the content, but also you can control a lot more of what goes on (like collecting click-stats to sell to advertisers, DRM on media content, make sure ad blockers aren't used, etc). Remember that we're talking News Crap here - so they'll want total control … just like Apple! ;)
The tone of the writing will be populist, but informed, presumably like The Sun.
Oh great - now I've got to go clean coffee off of my keyboard/screen again. Any chance you could warn folks before using the words “Sun” and “informed” in the same sentence?! :laugh:
The Daily will launch exclusively, initially, on the iPad and Steve Jobs has apparently got all excited about it. It will effectively be an app that pushes new edition of the publication once per day. It will be US-focused and cost 99 cents per week for a subscription.
Price seems pretty reasonable for a daily scandal-sheet, although limiting to iPad and US seems a little dumb - maybe this is toe-in-the-water for other launches in other countries? Although I'm pretty certain that there Apple sold a lot less iPads in the UK - so smaller potential market, in which case I guess US-only does make sense.
Scott B;2008934
I can see a place for locally stored news - e.g. reading on the tube.

The tube - yes no reception. However:

For the silly people, you can have the iPad with The Daily app.

For the normal people, they just read the Metro or the Evening Standard.

One is FREE. The other is just plain silly.
This all comes down, ultimately, to one simple issue ….. can you give people something they are prepared to pay for?

HEXUS article
The biggest one is immediacy. How can a daily publication possibly compete with the 24/7 immediacy of the online news environment? Why would people pay for content that they could have got the equivalent of for free up to a day earlier?
That's the question.

If you are going to try to charge for something that, at least superficially, people can get for free then you're going to have to come up with a convincing reason why they should pay, and why what you can get for free only superficially appears to be as good as what is being charged for.

But let's be clear - just because you can get “news” free on the net doesn't necessarily mean it's as good. For a start, getting news isn't cheap, and requires having people on the scene, often all over the world. That costs serious money, and even fairly large companies can't afford it, let alone the websites run by three men and a dog, or even a student in his bedsit, in his spare time. And having got that raw data, you then need to :-

- be able to interpret it, and
- be able to communicate it with clear and insightful writing.

Both of those require knowledge and expertise.

Is a paid-for newspaper a viable model? Oh yes, if the overall package produces a product worth paying for, either in depth or breadth of content, and in the quality of the interpretation and delivery. Oh, and you need a readership that's both aware of that difference in interpretation and delivery, and prepared to pay for it.

The FT, for instance, can get away with it. The Consumer Association (Which?) can get away with it. There are quite a number of other examples. But is it going to be a mass-market outlet, like a tabloid ‘news’-paper? I doubt it.

Oh, and one more thing that will sell subscriptions is if you have something unique, something people want enough to be willing to pay for it, and that they can't get anywhere else. The FT provides that in the quality of the reputation of their writers, and the Consumer Association provides it in their reputation for objectivity and independence from advertisers and manufacturers.

If Murdoch provides breadth and depth of cover, prompt delivery, quality of interpretation and journalistic craftsmanship, then he may come up with a “product” that enough people will pay for to make the model viable. But I'm not holding my breath, and while the like of the BBC and others provide a free news site, his product is going to have to be pretty special to get anything more than a fairly small percentage of consumers to be prepared to subscribe to it.