Apple and News Corp head Rupert Murdoch are reportedly working together to deliver the first iPad-only news publication
The holiday season is in full swing and you better believe that the folks at Apple are doing anything but sitting back at home and eating leftover turkey. A few days ago, the Guardian reported that Apple and News Corp are working together to develop a newspaper available exclusively on the iPad. To be clear, this mean that there will be no corresponding print or web edition. This ‘iNewspaper’, as it were, will be iPad only and may mark a new era in how we consume news.
Dubbed the Daily, the publication will run users a mere $0.99 a week and will involve a recurring subscription model not yet available for similar news apps. Why so cheap? Well, with no printing or distribution costs, all News Corp really has to account for is it’s writing and technical staff. In theory, this type of venture is really a win-win for all parties involved.
According to the US elite fashion industry journal Women’s Wear Daily, the Murdoch-Jobs “newspaper” will be run from the 26th floor of the News Corp offices in New York, where 100 journalist have been hired, including Pete Picton, an online editor from the Sun, as one of three managing editors. The editor of the Daily has not been announced, but observers are assuming it will be Jesse Angelo, the managing editor of the New York Post and rising star in the News Corp firmament.
Also on board, and lending some mainstream credibility to the publication, is Sash Frere-Jones who currently works as a music critic at the New Yorker and will reportedly head up the arts and culture department at the Daily.
While the Guardian initially reported that Steve Jobs and News Corp. head honcho Rupert Murdoch would jointly announce their new iPad initiative by the end of the month, that’s not looking like a possibility given that December is just a few days away. Apple blogger John Gruber, meanwhile, writes that he’s heard from Apple sources that Thursday December 9th is the date when we’ll see the two tech/media icons take center stage at an Apple press event. But seeing as how Apple doesn’t typically schedule evens for Thursdays (gotta ride the wave of press for an entire week, right?), Gruber theorizes that a more likely date for the announcement would be the following Tuesday or Wednesday.
Murdoch believes the iPad is going to be a “game changer” and he has seen projections that there will be 40 million iPads in circulation by the end of 2011. A source said: “He envisions a world in which every family has a iPad in the home and it becomes the device from which they get their news and information. If only 5% of those 40 million subscribe to the Daily, that’s already two million customers.”
Murdoch, however, is the same man who paid millions for MySpace only to see the once popular website essentially lose all of its social cache to Facebook. That said, Murdoch is hardly a technology savant. But with Jobs also on board, it’ll be interesting to see how the built-in base of iPads, and other iOS devices, will jive with a recurring subscription newspaper on the cheap. I may be the wave of the future or it may be a bust, but if history is any indication, you don’t wanna bet against Steve Jobs. He revolutionized the way we listen to and access music, and newspapers may soon be next.
