The Daily for iPad: Can It Succeed?
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Credit: iTunes
In case you missed it, Rupert Murdoch and Apple officials finally launched their highly hyped daily newspaper for iPad yesterday. Murdoch has been looking for a way to revolutionize the news publishing business. He has spent over 30 million dollars to create a product people want to consume in The Daily. The Daily will sell for $0.99 a week. Murdoch is hoping to recover his investment with advertising in addition to subscription revenue.
The Daily may not offer the absolute best newspaper experience on iPad. But it is a dynamic magazine that goes beyond textual news and mixes in videos and other dynamic content. The Daily does have an attractive interface and would have a lot of potential if the blogs and sites such as Twitter were not around. As Mashable put it, one would expect a whole lot more out of a product that costs millions to produce:
expected more from a product with such an enormous budget, produced in collaboration with Apple’s own developer team. Still, I could have forgiven all had the quality of the content itself been better, if it had offered one item I couldn’t have found for free, and more intelligently written, on the web.
Telegraph’s Shane Richmond was not that impressed with The Daily either, calling it unimaginative along the way:
The Daily represents a complete failure of imagination. It’s not a ‘native’ iPad experience at all, it’s a news magazine torn up and stuffed, page-by-page onto the iPad screen.
The Daily proves that Murdoch, like many other publishers, just does not get how things work today as far as online news is concerned. Services such as Flipboard let iPad owners keep up with the “latest news” more effectively than with The Daily. The iPad may or may not be the end for laptops. The Daily will most definitely not be the end of anything.
