The Daily: Exclusive iPad News

Imagine a digital newspaper created specifically for the tablet world and published by News Corp and Apple. No print version, no online just a newspaper delivered direct to your tablet for that Apple preferred price point of 99 cents a week.

Rupert Murdoch, is determined to find the digital solution to newsprint that pays. Murdoch's Times recently claimed 100,000 paying customers for its web edition and the Wall Street Journal claims over 2 million readers, but will he now create a new competitor that will effectively compete with these? The US media claims that ‘The Daily’ will be launched at the end of this month and has been under development in the New York News Corp’s office on their 26th floor and has some 100 journalists onboard today.

The difference is that the Daily is solely focused to be a tablet paper and specifically today an iPad one. Murdoch is aligning with Steve Jobs and is gambling that people will be prepared to pay for what is openly free elsewhere online and that a tablet paper beats a newspaper app designed for the iPad and his own alternative newspapers. With no print and no online the paper is targeted at that Apple price point of 99 cents a week and the will obviously include Apple’s share and any taxes! Finally, the biggest gamble is that they can create a new brand.

The move is brave but with Apple backing could generate the adoption by many iPad fans seeking to be different and read the ‘Apple Daily.’

Meanwhile taking a more traditional route The Economist has launched its iPhone and iPad apps. It will be available every Thursday with all articles being cached for offline reading and also includes an audio edition.Existing print subscribers will get the new rendition free with the digital only edition being charged at $110 a year in the US. Dome content will be free and single issues can be purchased within the new app.

The Times Readership Drops With Paywall

Rupert Muroch made a big statement and said that The Times, had to move to a paid-content online subscription system and made the transition. We now read the figure for July from ComScore which shows a 1.2 million user drop for May’s 2.79 million-strong readership, to 1.61 million. More disturbing is the drop in the visitors' average time on the site from 7.6 minutes in May to 4 minutes in July.

News Corp head Rupert Murdoch is quoted "With our paywall around the Times, we have had an encouraging number of people subscribing at a good price,"

However, trends in July impacted the free Telegraph and Guardian who both recording losses of online readership whilst The Mail Online and The Independent, strengthened to 9 million and 3.54 million unique visitors, respectively.

So who is right and who is wrong and who cares? The one thing that is certain is the Murdoch will not admit he was wrong easily . It’s said that obne swallow doesn’t make a summer and it will take more then one readership drop to herald Winter.

News Corp Cuts Cloth as Friedman Moves On

News Corp. has had to act in the face of disastrous results and the press is now awash with stories of their various initiatives’. These include; forming a consortium that would charge for news distributed online and on portable devices, a potential move from ‘fortress Wapping, the sale of their free London paper and a pay reduction for Rupert.

Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller is believed to have met with news publishers including New York Times, Washington Post, Hearst Corp. and Tribune. Ever since William Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP and chief executive of MediaNews Group Inc., spoke in April against the "misappropriation" of news on the Internet, the momentum to look at charging has been growing. Robert Thomson, Wall Street Journal has gone as far as to call the news aggregators who believe in free content, "parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet."

Although newspapers have built an online readership, the revenue hasn't followed and Internet ads are still not significant. However, erecting pay walls may prove counter productive and just fuel infringement. Instead News Corp. is proposing a single online registration for readers to use across all news sites and to track the stories each person reads. They believe this accumulated demographic would appeal to advertisers but a consortium of newspaper publishers also risks raising issues of antitrust.

Murdoch needs to move fast to stem the flow of a red balance sheet and wishes the new charging model to be extended to tabloids such as the Sun and the News of the World where they believe they can capitalise on the perceived popularity of celebrity stories, scoops and what some may regard as high reader interest and low quality content.

News Corp are also looking to move from ‘fortress’ Wapping in the East end of London which grew to fame through often violent picketing in 1986. It has apparently agreed to occupy about 180,000 sq ft of the Thomas More office scheme, which is big enough to accommodate the majority of its Wapping workforce. This would free up the Wapping site for residential development but even with the Olympics in 2012 the timing in the current climate may prove a bit premature.

Mr. Murdoch’s son James has announced that they plan to close the 3 year old London Paper, which posted a $21 million pre tax loss for the year. The London Paper handed out over 500,000 copies a day, compared with 400,000 for the free London Lite, which is owned by Associated Newspapers. Mind you giving away papers is easy so the numbers are irrelevant really.

Cuts at News Corp. have included large-scale job losses at the social networking website MySpace. In response the 78-year-old Rupert Murdoch's pay has apparently dropped 28% down from $27.5m, to $19.9m (£12.1m) . Although Murdoch's base salary of $8.1m remained unchanged, his performance-related bonus slumped from $17.5m to $5.4m. He did received a $6m in pension contributions and share awards and his son James Murdoch, who oversees News Corp's operations in Europe and Asia and chairs BSkyB television, saw his total remuneration drop from $10.9m to $9.2m.

Finally. Just as if the news wasn’t bad enough, OpenRoad Integrated Media, a new New York based eBooks marketing and publishing start-up, has raised $3 million in funding. What is interesting is that the company was founded only this year by Jane Friedman, former CEO of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide. She left Murdoch last year and with Chris Lederer, former CMO at HarperCollins aims to go beyond books into “integrated media”. So even Rupert’s ex employees are now striking out to make it on their own.

So where is HarperCollins going and is it a long term News Corp asset or a liability in these changing times?

Are News Corp to Have Their Own Colour Reader?

Rupert Murdoch is widely reported saying that News Corp is investing in a mobile digital device for reading newspapers on a larger screen than the typical ebook reader device.

News Corp is apparently investing in a potential Kindle rival which would not only have a larger screen but importantly, four-color capable display. This means they are either pre announcing something that isn’t here today or on the horizon, a colour ink device, or they are following the lead taken by Fujitsu which however has a full colour not four colour display.

So is it investor city talk or does it have substance. If News Corp were to back a new reader could it hold its own against what is getting a crowded space. Is he looking to back colour so he can exploit all his family of assets; TV, video, news and books through one device? Time will tell but when Murdoch wants some would say Murdoch gets.

A gauntlet if ever there was one, but he didn’t stop there.

In reference to the newspaper business model problems Murdoch is reported in the Wall Street Journal saying that ‘People are used to reading everything on the net for free, and that's going to have to change." He also questioned whether the newspaper industry should continue to allow online news aggregators, such as Google Inc., to aggregate newspaper content without being compensated for it.