Get your Daily iPad news 'ere!

The newspaper business has been described as ‘turning information into money’.  Whilst that might have been true at one time, more and more papers have found that the process has been more like tearing up £50 notes.  With circulation falling pretty well across the board, and losses on the rise at a number of papers, proprietors and editors have been looking for their very own silver bullet.

One reason for declining sales has been that more and more customers are choosing to read their news on-line, and in most cases, for free.  Recently, however,  Rupert Murdoch’s Times and Sunday Times have started to charge for their on-line content, a measure that is being closely scrutinised by the rest of the industry.  If they can make this work, then others will surely follow, and the chances of a good night’s sleep for editors and proprietors will be increased.  The Murdoch empire has launched another initiative in recent days, with the launch in the US of The Daily, the first digital newspaper designed specifically for the iPad.

Rupert Murdoch at the launch of The Daily

The iPad is an enigma within a riddle: it has always seemed to me that it is a clever gadget in search of a niche, but Apple’s currently on one of its periodic ‘ups’, so who knows?  Simply because it’s stylish and made by Apple, it will sell in its millions to their  loyal army of gadget freaks – what some of us call the ‘more money then sense brigade’.   In fact, there are a lot of those people out there, and Gartner, the most respected of the IT analyst firms, reckons there will be around 70M of them by the end of 2011: a big number, but still peanuts in the greater scheme of things.  Those iPad customers are currently being invited to pay 99c. per week, or $40 per year to subscribe to The Daily, but how many of them will take up the offer?

Estimates seem to come in around the 1%-2% mark, so the circulation could be somewhere around 1M sometime in the next few years.  Will $40M p.a. be enough to make The Daily pay?  Not without a fair old chunk of advertising revenue too – Murdoch said that he is aiming for a 50:50 split between subscription and advertising revenues. 

Every day the plan is to produce around 100 pages of news, sport, comment, games, and more, including no doubt, celebrity gossip.  Murdoch said at the launch, ‘“New times require new journalism. Our challenge was to take the best of conventional journalism … and combine it with the best of new technology,  Our aim is for The Daily to be the indispensable source for news, information, and entertainment.”
What I am most looking forward to following is the cultural battle that seems to be set to take place.  Murdoch’s empire generally propounds conservative views – at the launch he said that the political tone of The Daily would be in the hands of the editor – well he was hardly going to say anything different, was he?  However, he also implied that it would be generally patriotic, which is no surprise, given the support formerly given to the Tea Party by some News Corp companies (although Murdoch stepped in to curtail Fox News’ overt support).  Now I don’t see your average iPad user being a Tea Party fan – Apple’s success has been built on its differentness, its quirkiness, and its lack of  the traditional US corporate ethos.  Will those Apple customers be pleased to get The Daily’s conservative news agenda on their dinky new iPads?  I have my doubts.