Apple and Murdoch Making an iPad Newspaper?
It's likely you don't read Women's Wear Daily for the tech news, so you'd be excused for missing an interesting but incongruous story it published saying Apple and media mogul Rupert Murdoch have teamed up to make a daily newspaper only available through the iPad.
The New York Times has since corroborated the Women's Wear Daily (WWD) story, though it's still not clear how a fashion site got such an interesting technology scoop. The iPad newspaper will be called The Daily, and it will only be available on the iPad and other tablet devices .
Murdoch seems to be investing a lot in this new kind of newspaper, despite the general decline of the newspaper business. Sources say The Daily will have a newsroom staffed by 100 employees in the "twenty-something" demographic and a former managing editor from the New York Post. WWD says The Daily is supposed to have a "tabloid sensibility with a broadsheet intelligence," which can also be thought of as "The New York Post Goes to College." It's clear from that description and the deliberate mention that the paper will be staffed by twenty-somethings that Murdoch is aiming to make the newspaper attractive to younger audiences who already get their news online .
The Daily will have a nationwide reach and cover standard news topics, but with an emphasis on entertainment. The Daily will apparently also go on the campaign trail for the 2012 elections.
As far as the business model, it's Murdoch we're talking about here, so you can be sure there's a paywall. The Daily will be available to iPad owners and other unspecified tablets for $0.99 per week or around $4.25 per month. It will have issues 7 days a week, which indicates that it will not just be a regular news site constantly updating with stories. However, in a world of instant updates, it will be interesting to see if people like the format.
The Daily will be in beta testing by the end of the year and is expected to officially launch early in 2011.
