Publishing through a website is so 2009.Late this month, according to US and UK media reports, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp will launch an iPad-only newspaper.Created in collaboration with Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, it will be available for Apple's i
Publishing through a website is so 2009.
Late this month, according to US and UK media reports, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp will launch an iPad-only newspaper.
Created in collaboration with Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, it will be available for Apple’s iPad – and only iPad (although an edition for tablets running Google’s Android software is also said to be in the works).
It's likely Murdoch finds an iPad edition appealing because while Generation Y won't pay a cent for anything on the web, it is attuned to paying for mobile content.
And Apple brings iTunes to the party: a clean, user-friendly content delivery and payment mechanism (although one industry insider, who correctly predicted Murdoch's mobile push last month, telling NBR that programmers were being flown in from around the world for a "code jam" in New York, said today that "The reports of collaboration between Apple and News Corp are overblown. All Apple have done is provide a proper subscription billing solution.")
Called the “Daily”, and selling for 99 cents a week, the iPad newspaper will based in New York.
100 journalists have already been hired, ranging from Pete Picton – an online editor with low-brow English tabloid The Sun - to Sasha Frere-Jones, latterly of the high-high-high brow New Yorker, who will edit an arts and culture section.
Together they will create a publication that combines "a tabloid sensibility with a broadsheet intelligence" (or kill each other during their first coffee break).
Meanwhile, Mr Murdoch continues to spread his beats, also experimenting with paid content through the web with various properties including The Times, which recently revealed that 105,000 had paid for online content - although many on a short term or one-off basis.
Apple sold just over 4 million iPads during the tablet's first quart onsale; some analysts expect as many as 40 million in the global market by the end of next year - but it's also a market that could fragment as Google Android devices gain influence; BlackBerry launches its own tablet, the PlayBook, early 2011; and Microsoft attempts a comeback in the space.
In terms of iPad start-ups, Mr Murdoch's Daily will face competition from Flipboard - an iPad publication so trendy and ephemeral we're not even sure if it's a publication at all. Only that it's wildly popular, and one of Time's 50 Best Inventions of 2010.
