Digital Media

The Daily launches

By | Published on Thursday 3 February 2011

The Daily

So, Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily iPad newspaper launched in the US yesterday. Did you whoop?

I’ve not seen it, on account of me being very busy, and not because I don’t own an iPad. I mean, that guy on the bookings desk at the Apple Store yesterday was pretty skinny, and he had an iPad, and while I’m not especially strong, I have a bit more weight than I used to, and I reckon I could have easily knocked him over, grabbed the iPad, and have been hidden in the Regent Street crowds before anyone noticed. But I didn’t. Not because I have any sort of in-built moral code you understand, but because, like I say, I’d have been far too busy to read The Daily anyway. Besides, I don’t think you can even download it in the UK yet.

But from what I hear, the new digital news publication from News Corp has a magazine feel to it, combines news, sport, gossip and opinion, has some interactive nonsense and lots of bits of video and audio, and uses a lot of photos and infographics (that being the new word for “diagrams”, it seems). There was very little music content in issue one, aside from coverage of Citigroup taking control of EMI, though Billboard points out that New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones is heading up cultural coverage, and therefore we can presumably expect music to regularly feature in the arts section. Whether YouTube or VEVO clips will be embedded in due course remains to be seen.

The Daily is free for American iPad owners to download for a fortnight, via a sponsorship deal with Verizon. After that it will be 99 cents a week or $40 a year. As previously reported, Murdoch hopes that consumers unwilling to pay to access news content via the web might pay for a multi-media news-ganza on their iPad.



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