Rupert Murdoch has released The Daily – a new, iPad only newspaper. I watched the press conference and downloaded it. Let me answer some questions.
Is it revolutionary? Well, not quite. It is exactly what you would expect a daily newspaper on the iPad to look like that is modelled on newspapers of old. It is just upgraded with nice colour photos, embedded video, a way to comment and post to Twitter and Facebook and ads which sometimes do things other than just stare at you hoping for attention. So not revolutionary and the idea is you read it pretty much from cover to cover. That said, want to send a letter to the advice columnist and it is one click away. So it is digitally integrated. The weather also gets updated.
How is the content? Very News Corp. A couple of main stories up front, followed by a Gossip Section, opinion (quoting Tyler Cowen’s book), arts & life, apps & games (including a crossword and Sudoku) and the sports at the back – you know, just like a newspaper. Sadly, no comics. It looks like a newspaper but it doesn’t look like one that is of niche appeal. This is desired to hit the average iPad user.
Who is going to pay $1 per week for it? Well, it isn’t too expensive, I’ll give it that. If you want to read a newspaper cover to cover every day and don’t want it too heavy on content then this fits the bill. It is a commuter or breakfast newspaper. It is then worth the cost. I personally don’t read that stuff on my commute – I’m into reading the feeds and seeing what is up on the NYT, CNN and ABC Australian news sites. My days of newspaper reading passed years ago so don’t look at me. The question is whether there are still newspaper as opposed to news readers out there.
What about advertisers, will they fork out for it? …
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To survive The Daily needs 500,000 readers to cover the $500,000 weekly operating costs plus taxes plus return on investment plus cannabilisation of something or rather. That is a lot of readers and about 5 per cent of the iPad market as it will likely be around mid-year. If I had to guess then I would conclude that this is the past of newspapers rather than the future of the news.
Joshua Gans is a professor of economics at Melbourne Business School and a visiting scholar at Harvard University. The full version first published is: HERE, on The Drum Unleashed
Murdoch’s Daily struggle
Stephen Bartholomeusz
Published 2:52 PM, 4 Feb 2011 Last update 0:08 AM, 5 Feb 2011
Rupert Murdoch’s much-vaunted iPad-only digital newspaper launched overnight to mixed reviews. If The Daily is to be the future for newspapers, it is going to have to achieve some very ambitious targets.
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Using the more optimistic estimates for iPad sales, and assuming the same mix of sales within the US and elsewhere as appears to have occurred last year, The Daily would still need to attract subscriptions from more than five per cent of all US iPad owners to achieve Murdoch’s target this year. If there were 40 million iPads out there, it would still need about 3.5 per cent of their US owners to subscribe.
That’s ambitious for a start-up masthead which, while it contains multi-media content, is ultimately just a digital tabloid still competing with a multitude of other digital news and feature publishers, most of them free.
There doesn’t appear to be anything unique or particularly novel in the content of The Daily, which has received lukewarm reviews and it is an open question whether the technical capabilities of the app will be enough to distinguish it from the other near-10,000 news apps available.
No-one would ever doubt, however, Rupert Murdoch’s willingness to take bold decisions, involving acts of faith or gut instincts and tens of millions, if not billions, of dollars, and hold his nerve and wear the losses for longer periods than most public company operators could contemplate. He also has an instinct for popular tastes, albeit apparently not much understanding of technology or the new media.
The Daily is an experiment by Murdoch that he hopes might identify a future for his newspapers. All of his publisher peers will be watching and hoping that The Daily reflects the instincts that created Fox News, and not those that led to the acquisition of MySpace.
Read the full article on BusinessSpectator, HERE
First published: 2011-02-04 01:08 AM
