Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is working on the launch of a daily newspaper for the iPad.
Due to appear early next year, The Daily will not be a rolling news service, but will take the form of a regular newspaper. While there will be occasional updates throughout the day, the bulk of the content will appear as a single early morning edition.
There will be no print edition and no web edition, and other sites will be unable to link to Daily stories – a decision which will undoubtedly affect advertising.
According to the New York Times, News Corp has invested $30 million in the venture and has already hired around 100 staff. While some content will be recycled from the company’s other publications, the bulk is expected to be original.
The choice of staff – many from tabloid newspapers – indicates that the paper may be comparatively lowbrow. If this is the case, it’s an editorial policy that may sit uneasily with iPad users, who tend to be a sophisticated bunch.
It’s also interesting to speculate how Murdoch’s fondness for half-dressed Page Three girls will sit with Apple’s determination to keep the iPad clean.
This summer, British News Corp titles The Times and The Sunday Times went behind a paywall. While the company has hailed the move as a success, critics have pointed out that its subscriber figures are still pretty slim.
In October, the company announced that the Times and Sunday Times had achieved over 105,000 paid-for customer sales, of which about half were for monthly subscriptions; and while the company seemed pretty pleased with this, it’s not exactly a huge number compared with the three million unique viewers it had per month before the paywall went up.
The Daily is expected to publish seven days a week, and cost 99 cents per week.
