Kryptonite
This one has been brewing for a few months, but with various major publications jumping on the story this weekend it's getting as close to official as you can without actually troubling the press officers.
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is apparently putting the pieces in place to launch a major new newspaper - one that will be published exclusively on the iPad. Murdoch made it clear over a year ago that he thinks subscriptions are the way forward, with advertisers increasingly hard to come by. Since then he has made the online versions of UK papers like The Times and The News of the World subscription only.
A year later the FT reported that News Corp was near to a decision on whether to launch a tablet-only news organisation, which the LA Times appeared to confirm had received the green light a couple of weeks later. Then, last Thursday, WWD (Women's Wear Daily!) appeared to have inside information - including what Murdoch gets up to at 2am - which catalysed the flood of semi-speculative reports we saw this weekend.
Here's was it all comes down to: the publication will be called The Daily. It will derive some content from other parts of News Corp, but there will be a team of around 100 journalists generating content exclusively for The Daily. The tone of the writing will be populist, but informed, presumably like The Sun.
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.
Our view is that it's a promising idea and that the rest of the media world should be grateful to Murdoch for trying to innovate out of the advertising death-spiral it's currently in. However there are a couple of reasons why we think The Daily will struggle and they're both to do with the news media environment it's trying to revolutionise.
The biggest one is immediacy. How can a daily publication possibly compete with the 24/7 immediacy of the online news environment? Why would people pay for content that they could have got the equivalent of for free up to a day earlier?
The second is the issue that always arises when discussing the online subscription model: why would people pay for something they can get for free elsewhere? The Daily needs to create sufficient unique, desirable content to answer this question. Also there's the matter of Google; presumably this massive traffic driver will be of no assistance to The Daily.
Regardless, this will be an interesting and potentially pivotal media experiment at a time of great change in the way people consume their news. With tablets rapidly emerging as the antidote to watching rubbish TV, they are likely to be a major new source of eyeballs, and News Corp is leading the charge to grab them.
