Today at the Guggenheim Museum in a snowy, cold New York, the re-animated corpse of Rupert Murdoch and Apple’s Eddy Cue launched their iPad-only newspaper, The Daily.
The event began with a look at the first edition of The Daily, which is live right now in the App Store. The content certainly ticks all the boxes – interactive features, videos and a high degree of personalisation – including the ability to customise the sports pages of the paper around your favourite team.
The Daily editorial team have the ability to add pages into editions dynamically in case of breaking news, and a coverflow-esque page viewer will guide you towards unread features. Apple’s Cue said the iTunes subscription feature is Daily-only right now, but will be available to other developers soon.
Murdoch himself answered a few questions, notably stating that it is their aim to be on all tablets, but they chose the iPad first as “we think last year, this year, and next year will belong to the iPad.”
Interestingly, Murdoch spoke quite candidly about the amounts of money involved with the launch – News Corp. have already sunk $30million into the endeavour, and the running costs should be about $500,000 per week (not meaning to toot my own horn, but that’s pretty close to the analysis of the launch costs I put together 2 weeks ago).
Murdoch also said that if they can amass 800,000 subscriptions then The Daily will be a viable enterprise – the Wired magazine on iPad currently sits at around 20,000 subscribers. Good luck, Rupert.
Although the presentation contained lots of grandiose statements about “re-imagining our craft” and plenty of technical promise, it still seems like a fairly done deal to me that The Daily will fail. To turn a profit, the traditionally right-leaning News Corp has to attract traditionally left-wing Apple customers to the tune of almost 10% of existing US iPad owners. I applaud their forward thinking, and completely support the idea of a tablet-only publication, but the amount of investment News Corp. have made in this completely unproven medium is madness.
I have a sneaking suspicion this will go down as just another one of Murdoch’s fruitless digital adventures. How delightfully appropriate the launch took place is a museum.
