According to an article by Women's Wear Daily, rumors are circulating that News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch is teaming up with Apple CEO Steve Jobs to launch a new digital-only newspaper. Dubbed, "The Daily," an iPad project will allegedly stream right into a user's iPad seven days a week for the fairly low price of $0.99 per week, or about $4.25 monthly.
Sources say Murdoch is said to have gotten the idea for the project from a survey that suggested that readers spent more time on their iPads than on the internet. According to Women's Wear Daily's John Koblin, Steve Jobs and Murdoch have been in conversations about the project for a while.
Apple's role in this interesting enterprise seems to rest in offering engineering expertise but one has to question: 1) how much of Apple's engineering will show in an iPad only e-newspaper and should any newspaper create a product for viewing on just one product? What about other tablets or e-readers?
After watching the latest installment of Harry Potter this weekend, I am reminded that a moving picture in a newspaper was a far fetched idea when the Harry Potter series began but today is not. Today it’s possible to have some form of video on a tablet or e-reader, although for an iPad it would most likely not be Flash driven.
Around 100 staffers will contribute to the paper's digital pages out of News Corp's New York City headquarters. Expect to see a beta version of "The Daily" launched sometime around late December—perhaps even on a rumored standalone newsstand application that Apple's alleged to be working on. The full version of "The Daily" will hit the iPad in early 2011.
The move comes in the wake of rumors that Apple will be selling newspaper subscriptions like they sell programs through the App Store. In return for a portion of the subscription price and advertising revenues, newspapers and magazines will be permitted to offer subscriptions through the App Store itself.
As an early adopter of electronic newspapers, I am not sure I would switch to a newspaper just because it was designed specifically for a tablet or e-reader. I think most early adopters would agree that the purchase of a subscription was based on “voice” of the publication, not the design. I sit next to many other early adopters on airplanes who read the Wall Street Journal, USA Today or the New York times.
What do you think? How compelling is it to read a newspaper that is designed from scratch for a tablet or e-reader as opposed to a newspaper that was transformed from a paper version to an electronic version.
Howard Fenton is a Senior Consultant at NAPL. Howie advises commercial printers, in-plants, and manufacturers on workflow management, operations, digital services, and customer research.
Discussion
By Steve Smith on Nov 23, 2010
The early adoptions that I have viewed were and most still are just a copy of the newspaper design, some still have columns which are very frustrating when reading through a window. This is the point in that with the traditional newspaper the "window" is the page and design and layout has evolved to make the user experience a pleasant one. Tablets or just a browser based view requires a different approach to provide a good user experience and as such it makes a great deal of sense to create a newstablet publication from scratch. More to the point it creates an opportunity for the company to change the landscape and be paid for the content, which would not be lost on Rupert
By Chuck on Nov 23, 2010
See this article from The New York Times, http://bit.ly/h4FtYZ
The New York Times article sounds a bit pessimistic about their prospects, but one would expect as much since it's a News Corp Property and the two companies don't like each other much.
I give it a much better chance myself. More and more content will originate online, whether for a browser or for mobile devices like the iPad, and perhaps afterward be re-purposed for print. I think this will be especially true in the news area.
By Adam on Nov 26, 2010
I'm an early adopter of the iPad by luck. It was a bday gift from my wife. Now that I have it I know I would purchase one because it is so much lighter to carry around than a laptop, so much easier to read than an iphone and I like the touch-screen capabilities. I admit, I'm also a techie and I don't like to have my devices limited so I had my iPad jailbroken the moment I got it which gives me the ability to "try before buy" many apps. I have viewed many news and magazine apps and I really don't understand what people mean when they say tablet-layout.
When I hold the tablet in a portrait position, the screen looks no different from a page of a book. If that "page" view happens to have 3 columns I want the application to give me the option to tap on any column and zoom in on it to fill the whole view just like in a book (something the New York Times app does not do, as an example)
Personally, I read content and I only click on supporting video one out of every 3, that being said because the tablet offers the ability to play video I like when the publisher offers it to me in his product. But content is still king, if there's no video or picture I won't cry about it. The article above is a great example, it does not have any videos or pictures yet I found it very interesting.
For a guy who has very deep pockets and a true sentiment for newspapers creating a special newspaper app and getting his son to hype it up is something that Mr. Murdoch can do but most of all it is something that he MUST do. He must show his shareholders that the company is moving forward. He must show his bankers that he's not keeping his money in his bank account but constantly investing in opportunities. Money must go round; although he did not make it go round too far with Myspace.com
As for the tablet and the news/magazine business model around it I don't think anyone has a clue. I know one thing from personal experience: content providing apps cannibalize eachother: I used to read a lot of google news on my iphone and twitter on the PC, then I got the iPad and I started reading more twitter on the iPad but then I got REEDER to feed me my google rss feeds and because it is truly a great news feed application (its user interface utilizes the touch screen to its fullest potential)I stopped using twitter and google news. And lately I've been getting too overwhelmed with RSS feeds and decided to get back to my comfy zone - took a plain old book by Umberto Eco off my bookshelf in which I can follow each printed character at the pace I want to; where there are no hyperlinks to make me act ADD-like jumping between pages 722, 324, 114, 2, 73 and no refresh buttons that throw more content at me as if the one from a second ago was no longer valid.
Here lies the problem and the opportunity with tablets: everybody uses the newspaper in the same way, everybody uses the TV in the same way, everybody uses the telephone in the same way, everybody uses their PC in the same way, everybody uses the smartphone in the same way (although here things start to become more personalized but everyone carries it around, makes calls on it, sends txts, writes short emails), but a tablet is a truly "make it my own" device, some people will use it to read books; some will use it to watch movies; some will use it as a laptop by connecting keyboards; some will play video games on it; students will use it as notepads and will annotate lecture notes; artists will doodle on it; many, we already know from research don't take it outside the house, I take it with me everywhere I go; and so on and so forth, the possibilities are endless. How do you make money on it? Ask Steve Jobs I guess, he seems to make money on it.
By Chuck on Nov 30, 2010
Some fun additional reading on the subject of Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs.
First, Valleywag piece about the firing by Murdoch of Gordon McLeod, the WSJ Digital Editor who apparently angered Steve at a dinner party, http://gaw.kr/gdO242.
Based on that fascinating little tidbit, it's interesting to speculate how much Steve is involved in The Daily. Here is a story from AOL on that topic, http://aol.it/gRrmzq. If Steve is even giving advice to Rupert Murdoch's team, then this is bound to be something very significant.
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