Rupert Murdoch on Wednesday pushed the send button on The Daily, a news application designed for the iPad that he hopes will position his News Corporation front and center in the digital newsstand of the future, the New York Times has reported.
The Daily is published as an app for iPads. Subscribers pay by the week or the year. The Daily will be a first of its kind for tablet computers: a general interest publication that will refresh every morning and will bill customers’ credit cards each week for 99 cents or each year for USD 40. The Daily aims to enliven the printed word with photographs, video and interactive features that work seamlessly together.
For Mr. Murdoch and the News Corporation, The Daily represents something far grander and more ambitious than a new business undertaking: it is an opportunity to try to reinvent the business model for news publishing. Mr. Murdoch indicated that The Daily was intended for a generation of consumers who expect “content tailored to their specific interests to be available anytime, anywhere.” But the generation of readers that has grown accustomed to curating the abundance of news content on the Internet rather than reading it in one daily or weekly publication has also grown accustomed to having it free.
The Daily’s price is deliberately low. Available only on iPads, it will be free to users for the first two weeks, courtesy of a sponsorship deal with Verizon.
