Murdoch's "The Daily" Set For January 19th Debut
January 10, 2011
This week belongs to the Verizon iPhone. Next week, Rupert Murdoch will take center stage as he unwraps his long awaited “The Daily.”
According to Forbes, the iPad-only publication debuts on January 19. Murdoch himself indicated as much to select reporters at last week's Consumer Electronics Show.
While details remain sketchy, think of “The Daily” as a place to access articles from various sources in the United States and abroad. It will also include fresh content from a staff that will write articles exclusively for the app’s readers.
The big news is “The Daily” is expected to include a new “push” subscription model from Apple, where iTunes will automatically bill customers on a weekly or monthly basis for subscriptions.
The creation of this type of billing program would be good news for publishers and customers worldwide. Right now, newspaper and magazine providers are unable to provide iPad subscription services. Instead, customers are forced to pay “per issue.” Typically, these prices are much higher than what a reader would pay for paper versions of the same title. Subscriptions should bring prices down, and lead to better iPad magazine sales overall.
According to Forbes:
The debut can’t come soon enough for The Daily’s staffers, who for weeks have been engaged in full-scale dry runs, cranking out dummy issues for what I’ve been told is a distribution list of 1,000 privileged readers. (If you’re on the list and you want to email me a few screen grabs, I’d take that ever so kindly.) Some of that content presumably consists of features that can be banked, but a lot of it is news, meaning its sell-by date will long have passed by the time The Daily goes live.The new publication already has a "coming soon" web presence at http://www.thedaily.com/.