WIRED:Rupert Murdoch has just launched his digital, iPad-only magazine called the 'Daily'
RUPERT MURDOCH made a personal appearance last week at a packed New York press conference to herald the launch of his most unusual media venture in years.
Called the Daily, it is an electronic news magazine, downloadable for use on Apple's iPad – and only the iPad. The Dailyis, at heart, a newspaper, with short articles on fashion, sports and current affairs.
That core is lightly adorned with the video, audio and animated visualisations that the iPad can also present, but in tone and intent it seeks to replicate and redeploy the multiple-column, paginated style of a middle-brow American newspaper.
You can move around its pages with a flick of a finger, pluck them from a carousel of iTunes-like thumbnails – but they’re still pages, with a clear news magazine ancestry. It shares one more thing with its inky counterpart: a cover price.
You heard me: the Dailyis a subscription-only paper. It is free for the next two weeks, courtesy of US telephone company Verizon, but after that, readers will pay $1 a week for its content (somewhat inexplicably, it is only available to US readers for now).
Will it succeed? Let me say outright that I’d like to think it could. I would like there to be a commercially viable digital format that is readily comprehensible by traditional media writers, editors and publishers.
Many people are already making a lot of money writing digital content, but it would be nice if, among those creators, were the comfortably transplanted experts and institutions of the traditional news media.
The least interesting result for the Dailywould be for it to be yet another expensive media venture to stumble into the digital world, eat time and money and then ignominiously die as an ill-considered, costly flop.
While there are plenty out there who would use the past perceived crimes and biases of Murdoch and his companies to wish upon him a conspicuous failure, I do not believe the digital world operates on that kind of karmic basis.
The Dailyis certainly not ill- considered, at least not patently so. A lot of care has gone into making this a professional, readable piece of work. A dedicated iPad app takes care of the fonts, transitions and overall fit and finish of the package. It is not some thrown-together project as so many attempts to bridge print to digital can be.
A professional team of coders, designers and editors has worked long and hard on this and learned many of the lessons of nearly two decades of digital news experimentation.
The staff of the Dailyhave their work cut out for them. It cannot afford to be merely above average effort, because creating the Dailyrequires simultaneously solving two extremely challenging problems in one institution: launching a new newspaper brand and creating a state-of-the-art software application.
Let's take the first. I have seen three arguably successful newspaper launches: America's USA Today, the British Independentnewspaper and London's Metro. About them lie many corpses.
The Dailyis free of some of the challenges of launching a new print periodical: the mechanics of distribution and already filled market niches. The lesson of the successes though is that one needs to quickly create a publication with character.
On that score, you would think that the Dailywould have the wind behind it. The iPad, its home, is a brand with a strong identity already; if the product could commandeer some of that magic, it would be halfway there.
I don't get that though from the editorial choices of the Daily. It's more Timemagazine than the designer chic of Apple.
It speaks to an average middle America that is already oversaturated with mass- manufactured news. That’s a big market but is it a market that is burning for a new format?
The second question I feel more comfortable answering. The app that wraps the Dailyis a fine application, with many smart ideas – but it crashes.
Even when it doesn’t crash, it takes minutes to load anything that I can read. People downloading an update for the original crashy version found the new version even more fragile.
These are the sort of problems that beset version 1.0 software, it’s true, but I struggle through that early adoption because the rewards of most software make it worthwhile.
I end up with a program that gives me access to billions of pages of the world’s knowledge or a 3D depiction of the entire world, or even the addictive antics of suicidal birds against chuckling pig-soldiers.
I love newspapers too, but this is the app universe they are competing in. Their digital equivalent has to be as beautiful, as compelling and as smooth as their real competitors, not those they left behind them on the newsstands.
I wanted to adopt the Dailyinto my day. Right now, as they say within its artificially winnowed market of people who have iPads, live in the United States, like news magazines and want another one, I'm not feeling the love.
Of course, I doubt that Murdoch really cares or expects my affections. However if this experiment is to survive, it needs to find an audience who really cares as badly about its future as its creators clearly do.
