Thoughts on the iPad-Only Newspaper The Daily
To much fanfare yesterday, The Daily was announced by Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp., together with Eddy Cue, Apple vice president of Internet services. This is the first iPad-only daily news organ, and it represents, apparently, some $30 million in investment.
The Daily states that it was “built from scratch for the iPad,” and it shows. It takes advantage of a number of iPad features, includes 360-degree photos, videos, and even games, to provide a truly unique form of information. At one point, a photo zooms out, at another point a tap on a photo plays a video report, and at yet another, a small box shows the latest tweets on a topic.
But for all these innovations, The Daily is a crappy newspaper with little real news. The first issue has a cover story about the demonstrations in Egypt, a story about the snowstorms in the US, and not much else in the way of news. Most of the rest of the paper is gossip, fashion pictures, horoscopes, an advice column, movie reviews and games. Okay, there are a couple of short editorials, but they’re stuck in between gossip and fashion, and don’t say much anyway. There’s a lot of attention to sports; notably to the Super Bowl, which, it so happens, is on News Corp.-owned Fox TV this coming Sunday.
The sports section is, in fact, the largest part of the first issue of The Daily, suggesting the type of audience the newspaper is targeting: those who don’t care about news. After all, one of the biggest stories of the year – the Egypt demonstrations, and the day that Hosni Mubarak announced that he would not seek reelection – gets a total of five pages, of which about one page is text. One other page talks about demonstrations in neighboring Arab countries. Then another page talks about Mubarak’s son and “trophy wife.” (That one is a three-page article with one page worth of text.)
Frankly, if you were to print all of this out, it would probably make a total of 6-8 pages of a New York Times-sized newspaper. Not much news for a buck.
So a lot of hoopla for news designed for people who don’t read news. The content of The Daily is roughly what you get in European cities for free: newspapers like 20 Minutes in France and other countries, distributed for free near subway stations and in city centers, offer more news than The Daily. They, too, contain very little serious news, and are designed, as the name suggests, to be read in 20 minutes. The Daily seems to be targeting people who think that Reader’s Digest is something worth reading. My guess is, though, that the people who spend what they do to buy an iPad are a bit more educated than those who would consider the content of The Daily to be worthwhile.
If you don’t have an iPad, you can see some screenshots of The Daily on the paper’s blog. This gives a good idea of the share of the paper that covers “real” news; as of this writing, only one of the screenshots shows a news story, while the rest cover the “meat” of the paper: ephemera.
But they got the interface right. I hope others will see what The Daily has been done and improve their own news apps. I would very much like to have a daily “paper” on my iPad, but it has to have real news, not this kind of crap.
Update: today’s second issue has a tad more news, but I counted 25 pages of sports, mostly about the Super Bowl (on Fox TV), and the gossip/fashion/lifestyle crap is nearly as much.
Posted: 2/3/2011 by kirk | Filed under: iPad | Tags: iPad, newspapers | 5 Comments »
Kirk, for a few mad moments some months ago, I subscribed to the internet version of the UK Times, which is also of course Murdoch owned. I found it sad that this seminal publication had been reduced to such – excuse me – but “crap” for which I was expected to pay.
Murdoch seems to believe that by creating a virtual news monopoly he can reduce the quality of his publications to a level that’s so low the ability to read is hardly a pre-requisite.
Clearly the iPad effort attempts almost exactly that and he’s wrong. I will never spend a penny on such trite journalism and it is not because I refuse to pay for news, I have an FT net subscription that costs me over $200 per year.
Frankly I’m surprised that Apple would involve itself with Murdoch’s empire. I see the iPad newspaper as an attempt to reduce news to the lowest possible level where Murdoch perceives the largest audience to be (See the UK “Sun” as a fine example).
I think if all us iPad users ignore it completely then perhaps Apple will get the message and find a publisher to give us something more worthy!
“Frankly I’m surprised that Apple would involve itself with Murdoch’s empire”
The Apple/News Corp. alliance has been going on for a while now.
It’s no coincidence that the only two networks on Apple’s rental service on the new Apple TV are Disney, where Steve-o is the largest shareholder, and Fox, where Steve-o and Rupert have been allied for the couple of years.
Money makes strange bedfellows.
(Of course, I’m a longtime Cupertino-lover who has grown increasingly disaffected with the company over the last 2 to 3 years, so I actually don’t find it too strange to see Jobs and Murdoch so cozy these days.)
This will fail if it doesn’t live up to it’s name “Daily” as in the news happening daily, not yesterday. I’m glad to see you mention that it’s a bit behind in “Daily” happenings.
I’m not sure why they aren’t pushing more “Now” content. If they can I think they will have a winner because the price point is a winner in my book.
Yeah the Sun in the UK is also a winner because of it’s price point but you’d be very hard pressed to find any real news in it. It’s Murdoch at his most cynical as I suspect iPad news will also be.
Very, very disappointing. And, frankly, difficult to understand. After all, why not an iPad service that is effective? The device is readable, perhaps even enjoyably so, unlike computer screens generally.