James Murdoch: "The Daily" Will Launch With Subscriptions In The Coming Weeks
by Joe White
January 25, 2011
James Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corp. (EU and Asia), recently confirmed that "The Daily" will launch "in the next few weeks." Furthermore, Murdoch added that he thinks the weekly subscription fee of $0.99 will be sufficient to support the publication.
At the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany, Murdoch talked about the upcoming digital newspaper:
Q: When is The Daily going to launch? So first, The Daily is going to be a very exciting digital publication, which I think should be launching in the next few weeks, I hope. It’s going to be a brand new piece of journalism. We want to get out there quickly, at a good price, and I think it will surprise people. I also think it will succeed or fail on the journalism part, not the bells and whistles. Q: You already employ about 126 people on the journalistic side for The Daily, and the price will be 99 US cents. Is that sufficient? Well, we wanted it to have a very good price, affordable for most people, at 99 cents a week. It lowers the barrier for people to enjoy high quality journalism. We realize the pricing models for apps and paid journalism as a whole is still developing, whether it will be bundled or tiered, and so on.He also talked about News Corp.'s relationship with Apple:
Q: Let’s move on to Apple, with whom you’ve been working together. Is it a good partner for you? We partner with them in a variety of areas, from iBooks to iTunes for our movie and TV shows business, so we have constant discussions about pricing and distribution methods. The interesting thing is that we create copyrighted content across the board, so we’re all learning our way through in different areas. With Apple, there’s positive engagement, we get a huge amount of support from them on The Daily for example. Obviously, we’ll have arguments with them in the future, on pricing, rules, and so on. But I would call it a positive relationship.Previously, we'd heard "The Daily" would launch on January 19. However, the launch was postponed, reportedly because Apple needed more time to “tweak its new subscription service.” However, it seems as though "The Daily" is becoming more and more of a reality, along with the "app subscriptions" service that will premiere with the publication. We'll keep you posted on the status of the digital newspaper. In the meantime, let us know your thoughts on "The Daily" in the comments below. And, thanks to TechCrunch for their DLD11 notes.