Today, Rupert Murdoch is introducing The Daily, his foray into an iPad-only newspaper. “New times demand new journalism,” he says. The challenge he says, is to “take the best of traditional journalism—competitive shoe leather joranlism, a skeptical eye, and combine it with the best technology such as 360 degree photographs. The iPad demands that we completely rethink our craft.”
Murdoch notes that a growing population of news consumers no longer read print or even watch TV. His aim with The Daily is to combine “the magic of great newspapers” with the magic of technology. “The Daily is not a legacy barnd moving from the print to the digital world. We have license to experiment. We believe The Daily will be the model for how stories are told.”
A new edition will come out every day, with updates throughout the day. it will feature a carousel navigation that looks like Coverflow, an dinclude video and 360-degree photographs.
Since there are no trucks and no printing costs, The Daily will cost 14 cents a day or about $1 a week. The first two weeks are free, thanks to a sponsorship by Verizon. You will be able to download it live at noon ET.
Murdoch also revealed that the total cost to get the Daily up and running—the technology, the staff, everything—has been $30 million, and that operating costs are half a million dollars a week.
I asked Murdoch why he thinks it is better to charge a subscription versus gaining a larger audience via free downloads and selling that larger audience to advertisers, who are lining up anyway because their ads look so much better in an iPad app. “I think they will pay much less per thousand if it was free,” says Murdoch. “We feel this is better for advertisers and will draw a better class of advertisers at a better rate.”
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Related:
Hands-On With The Daily (Demo Video)
The Daily Event Liveblog: Follow Along As The Newspaper Hits The Information Age
Murdoch: The Daily Will Cost $0.14 Per Day Or $0.99 Per Week
One-Click Subscriptions Come To the iPad
What Are The Odds We’ll See An Android Version Of The Daily?
