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About LinkBacksRead more.While there no official announcement yet, reports of the imminent ‘iPaper’ have reached critical mass.
Read more.While there no official announcement yet, reports of the imminent ‘iPaper’ have reached critical mass.
They do realise that these devices have a web browser, right?
Originally Posted by Agent
I can see a place for locally stored news - e.g. reading on the tube.
Yes, but aren't you limited in what you can do with a web browser (especially an Apple one - no Flash). Whereas if you have a proper app then not only can you easily lock it down so that only approved platforms access the content, but also you can control a lot more of what goes on (like collecting click-stats to sell to advertisers, DRM on media content, make sure ad blockers aren't used, etc). Remember that we're talking News Crap here - so they'll want total control ... just like Apple!
Oh great - now I've got to go clean coffee off of my keyboard/screen again. Any chance you could warn folks before using the words "Sun" and "informed" in the same sentence?!The tone of the writing will be populist, but informed, presumably like The Sun.
Price seems pretty reasonable for a daily scandal-sheet, although limiting to iPad and US seems a little dumb - maybe this is toe-in-the-water for other launches in other countries? Although I'm pretty certain that there Apple sold a lot less iPads in the UK - so smaller potential market, in which case I guess US-only does make sense.The Daily will launch exclusively, initially, on the iPad and Steve Jobs has apparently got all excited about it. It will effectively be an app that pushes new edition of the publication once per day. It will be US-focused and cost 99 cents per week for a subscription.
Career status: still enjoying my new career in DevOps, but it's keeping me busy...
The tube - yes no reception. However:
For the silly people, you can have the iPad with The Daily app.
For the normal people, they just read the Metro or the Evening Standard.
One is FREE. The other is just plain silly.
This all comes down, ultimately, to one simple issue ..... can you give people something they are prepared to pay for?
That's the question.
If you are going to try to charge for something that, at least superficially, people can get for free then you're going to have to come up with a convincing reason why they should pay, and why what you can get for free only superficially appears to be as good as what is being charged for.
But let's be clear - just because you can get "news" free on the net doesn't necessarily mean it's as good. For a start, getting news isn't cheap, and requires having people on the scene, often all over the world. That costs serious money, and even fairly large companies can't afford it, let alone the websites run by three men and a dog, or even a student in his bedsit, in his spare time. And having got that raw data, you then need to :-
- be able to interpret it, and
- be able to communicate it with clear and insightful writing.
Both of those require knowledge and expertise.
Is a paid-for newspaper a viable model? Oh yes, if the overall package produces a product worth paying for, either in depth or breadth of content, and in the quality of the interpretation and delivery. Oh, and you need a readership that's both aware of that difference in interpretation and delivery, and prepared to pay for it.
The FT, for instance, can get away with it. The Consumer Association (Which?) can get away with it. There are quite a number of other examples. But is it going to be a mass-market outlet, like a tabloid 'news'-paper? I doubt it.
Oh, and one more thing that will sell subscriptions is if you have something unique, something people want enough to be willing to pay for it, and that they can't get anywhere else. The FT provides that in the quality of the reputation of their writers, and the Consumer Association provides it in their reputation for objectivity and independence from advertisers and manufacturers.
If Murdoch provides breadth and depth of cover, prompt delivery, quality of interpretation and journalistic craftsmanship, then he may come up with a "product" that enough people will pay for to make the model viable. But I'm not holding my breath, and while the like of the BBC and others provide a free news site, his product is going to have to be pretty special to get anything more than a fairly small percentage of consumers to be prepared to subscribe to it.
That's still a bit of a niche inside a niche, though. And the tube is getting BT hotspots. And they could look into offline article caching.
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