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News Corp's The Daily Is Doomed
rsmiller510 writes "After all of the hype, it was surprising how much The Daily, the new News Corp. iPad daily newspaper, looks like a conventional news magazine. Ultimately, though, it's an old model in a new package and as such will fail."
Unfortunately for News Corp, as VentureBeat reports, it's already invested an astonishing $30 million just to launch this thing, and it will cost another $500,000 a week to keep it going. While Murdoch says the right things about taking the presses and the trucks out of the equation to produce a leaner operation, I'm left wondering how many subscribers and advertisers it will take to make the initial investment back, never mind make it profitable -- especially with Apple taking half of the subscription revenues.
News Corp has a quarterly revenue of around 8 billion dollars but their net income has been steadily declining (duh). To risk a one time cost of thirty million followed by a weekly liability of half a million to save that hemorrhaging is a bit of non issue in my opinion. I think Murdoch could give up one of his twenty yachts and reduce his yacht insurance to offset that if he wanted to pay for The Daily out of pocket.
The Apple comment further mystifies me. While terrible that they should lose so much money to Apple, it does give Apple incentive to see this succeed since it's designed for their product. So consider first how amazing Apple is at promoting products and how terribly backward News Corp has been as of late. It might turn out to be a paltry sum to have Apple selling their product with interest of seeing it succeed.
Regardless, if I've learned one thing from Microsoft and their initial XBox and Zune attempts, it's that a very very wealthy company that wants to shove something down the consumer's maw will not let up until it has turned a profit. The problem is that News Corp has what, eight billion sitting around in cash? Let the blood letting begin with this pin prick!
My work here is dung.
Failed model? I guess that's why you never see magazines in waiting rooms, grocery store endcaps or anywhere else anymore...;)
oh wait
I think the most important point of the article is that the app cost $30M to develop, and will cost .5M/week to keep running. As I see it, there's pretty much no way an iPad app like this is going to consistently bring in enough money to pay off the initial investment, or even keep up with the weekly costs.
Utterly doomed.
huh, what are the odds.... "rsmiller510" submitted a blog item by "Ron Miller"
The argument seems to be that people want a proliferation of new sources. Yes I'm sure that's why fox news and CNN and MS nbc all are watched by the same people eager for a proliferation of points of view. Or why readers of Huffpo also hang on the words of powerline blog and littel green footballs. Or how the readers of Hagee and the middle easter armageddonist news sources are widely read in the Slashdot crowd.
People do not channle surf these days. they find a few news aggregators they like, say huffpo, boingboing, andrew sullivan, fark nad slashdot, and then they follow the links one deep from there. But it's the aggregators that they come back too. A well constructued newsmag stands a chance. But if it is no more than the New york times or newsweek then it will also have plenty of competition.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I hate to be cynical, but my first reaction was that they where selling the content (rather then giving it away) and packaging it as a magazine so they could get away with it not really being news. Much like the only "news" segment on Fox News is about an hour a day and the rest is "commentary".
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Color me shocked that the writer for another website, marketing itself as a "macrosite for news", predicts the failure of another news aggregator.
I saw a TV interview with Murdoch yesterday, and he was trying to say that the most innovative thing about his iPad News service was it's GPS functionality. Supposedly no matter where you take the thing, it will give you news and weather that is relevant to the area that you are at.
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
"fark nad slashdot?" You are going to regret not registering that domain, good sir!
In briefer terms:
Why pay for things I can get for free online? Bits cost almost nothing. Instead: Rupert should be looking for new ways to pay his laborers, like collecting user data and selling it, like google does rather than charging for a newspaper.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
So what? If the editors don't think it's worth posting, they won't.
I think Murdoch mentioned that it would break even at 500k subscribers. I don't think that this will reverse the general decline in newspaper revenues, but reaching break-even or profitability on the app looks pretty easy.
Ok mods will burn me for this... but I think that their move to charge 30% off of the dying news industry might seriously backfire. Consider this:
i) the media industry has friends in high places;
ii) given enough time, they will become desperate and have nothing to lose;
To bet against Steve has been a surefire loss for a long time. But I would never fight against those with friends in high places, desperate, with nothing to lose.
I think it's only a matter of time between the news cycle starts turning all "Apple the subject of antitrust laws?" or the classic "Should Apple be broken up?". Neither AT&T nor IBM nor MS had a good run with the state dept. Perhaps Apple is overstreching a bit too far here; I for one think the backlash isn't worth that 30% cut.
This comment is right on the mark, but I wonder if Murdoch will wait for the money to happen. I would give this less than a year. (BTW, I have been wrong about every technology related prediction I have ever made.) Mostly I keep thinking, would I use this thing (if I had a tablet/iPad to run it on)? The answer is no, because for now the NYTimes is free. When their paywall goes up, I'll have to see how that works out and what other sources I might read. But it has been so long since I paid for news that I find it difficult to imagine going back to that. If nothing else, I'll send a hundred bucks to NPR and turn the radio on. Maybe I don't need to read the news at all.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Don't you mean "News" Corp.? Makes a big difference.
If the editors don't think it's worth posting, they won't.
you must be new here
Exactly, the issue isn't that people are unhappy with the online delivery methods that exist, it's that the ones that do exist are free.
Most people will not pay for something they can get for free, even if the pay version is just of moderately higher quality. It has to be much, much higher quality.
Since this is just plain text articles, basically - I don't see many people paying for the service when bookmarks work just as well, even on the iPad.
Judging by his picture, this "Ron Miller" guy should not be posting about tech news, he should be driving his Chevy Nova around 1970's San Francisco solving crimes.
Thank god, there is Ron Miller to tell us what to think and like.
While I am not particularly excited about The Daily specifically, Miller's assertion that "we" (who is "we"??) don't want a paid daily newspaper from a single source is very arrogant and short sighted. Many of us _do_ want a paid daily newspaper from a single source. No, that is not all that "we" read, but "we" like the reliable and consistent quality and even a little predictable bias. It is not the same as Google News. I am not bashing the latter, but to assume that everybody wants the same thing is amazingly naive.
"20-century model" in a "21-century package" is "doomed to fail from the get go". Oh my. Such buzz-filled nonsense makes me sick. A paper book is a 16-century model, and a Kindle is the same but in a "21-century" package. Are they doomed to fail?
Don't like "The Daily" (I personally don't) - OK - don't f*ink read it. But don't pretend you have deep all-encompassing insights about what everybody wants in the "21st century".
I checked it out. Its very pretty, but its just like having a pdf copy of any print magazine. If I wanted that I would just go to a newsstand a buy a magazine. There is nothing there to make you go "wow i haven't seen that before" and unfortunately for them without a wow factor this just isn't going to fly. Perhaps if it had imbedded photo galleries, interactive charts, etc, it might be more interesting but as it is, its comes across as a scanned version of a print magazine. Its just hard to believe they have already burned through 30 million and this is what they ended up with. For half a million a week, I would expect at least some level of interactivity and information I cant find elsewhere...so far they are delivering neither.
Because the mods here are just awesome at only selecting things that are newsworthy.
Next up in the firehose... "the paper clip turns 73"
I don't have an opinion about whether The Daily is going to make it or not. I've spent maybe 15 minutes looking at it so far (yesterday), and I'm going to give it more of a chance over the next couple of weeks while it's free. My initial thoughts weren't especially positive, but it's the content, not the business model, that didn't impress me. The content looked OK and was arranged decently, but I wasn't especially interested in most of what I saw. I didn't see that it was anything unique that I couldn't find anywhere else. If it continues to feel generic, it's going to die. However, if it dies, it's not going to be because people won't spend $1 a week on it. If content is unique and interesting, I'll easily pony up money for a week of it that's less than the cost of a soft drink these days. Some people won't pay anything, ever, for content. But I think that's shortsighted. SOMEONE has to be paid to produce content. It doesn't just magically appear from the Content Fairy. Just as people have to be paid if you want your grass cut or your hair cut or your plumbing fixed, you have to pay the people who produce content. I don't know what the best model is for paying those people, but the idea that you can forever get content for free isn't logical or reasonable. Content companies are losing money by giving away their material on the web. That is NOT going to continue forever. Anybody who understands business understand it you can't invest massive amounts of money into something not producing a return, especially while your traditional lines of business dry up. Those of us on the web have gotten a free product for years because we've been subsidized by the people who pay for printed and televised versions of the content. That subsidy won't last forever. SOMEONE has to find a way to get content producers paid. To simply declare that the future model is free is shortsighted and is a misunderstanding of what's happened on the web so far.
It'll either (1) be wildly profitable (I think this is unlikely) (2) be mildly profitable (3) Barely recoup costs, or (4) Hemorrhage money.
I think (2) or (3) are the most likely. I don't think it costs enough money to count as an hemorrhage especially considering it's modest costs compared to the company's total sales.
But no matter what happens, the industry will learn something from the experiment, so even if it's a total disaster, it won't be a failure.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
if/when the paywall goes up, google the url (assuming you heard about the story or were redirected there by someone), and it will most likely let you in. You really gotta hand it to those guys, they want the google traffic, while blocking those that went to their sites in the first place.
How do you make money in publishing?
Start out with lots of money.
Isn't a little much to editorialize in the title itself? I understand the referenced article is an opinion piece, but can the editors please clarify that this isn't an event that's actually happened or been established as true, perhaps with a more appropriate title like "Blogger claims New Corp's The Daily is doomed"?
"News Corp has a quarterly revenue of around 8 billion dollars [google.com] but their net income has been steadily declining (duh)."
Ah, that's why there will be "dances with smurfs" II and III to fill up the coffers.
In 1982 everyone said USA Today was a doomed paper, news papers were dying, no need for a national newspaper, color was too expensive, etc.
It remains one of the two biggest papers in the United States.
So really a day after launch is a little early to say the Daily won't take off.
Right below the video, the author of the article states: "What strikes me immediately is that The Daily looks like a conventional news magazine. I don't know what I was expecting -- perhaps something new and more exciting -- but what I got was essentially a multimedia iPad version of Time."
(1) The conventional news magazine is a winning model proven by decades of profit.
(2) The author had no specific idea what he wanted from the product.
(3) The author, while have no specific idea what he wants, he knew he wanted to be excited by something new to him.
What that can even be, who knows? Not him, that's for sure. Maybe there should have been a radioactive badger. Maybe he wanted to see words immediately downloaded into his brain while being hugged by Steve Jobs who's chanting, "You're my number #1 friend, Apple iPad User 0011286453. You make me happy."
It sure looks like a multimedia Time, but isn't that the next step in evolution? News media has gone from word-of-mouth, to letters, to print, to print with carved images, to print with black and white photography, to print with color photography, to digital distribution, to digital distribution with video. The problem is that the last couple steps were cluttered with links to other revenue-producing products, thus stealing away from the focus on the news. That's why print has survived despite the digital revolution.
The Daily take the high quality, quick turn-over expectations of online news media and puts it into the less-noisy magazine format.
Now, I hate Murdoch and pretty much the entirety of News Corp as much as the next rational person, but this looks to be done in the right format. That's how I want to read my online magazine news when I finally get a tablet PC. Stick a high standard for journalistic integrity on something like The Daily, and I'll be a subscriber.
Most bloggers generally either regurgitate news from other sources like News Corp properties while adding their own editorial spin on it or simply aggregate news from other sources. So given this, I am not in the least surprised that a blogger would claim that the daily is "doomed".
Here is a news flash for all of you wannabe "journalist" bloggers out there, you will fade into obscurity as the "web' becomes less relevant as a news source when the traditional media jumps on the electronic daily magazine bandwagon. These things are the future
Virgin media launched their magazine first with updating content on the iPad and this "Daily" takes the magazine concept one step further. You have the flashy layout of magazines combined with the dynamic and up to date feel of a website with the production values of the old news papers.
Blogging is the one that is doomed and news print media has been reborn as rich media that is both updated on the fly and persistent for times when the network connection is not there while retaining the production values of a glossy magazine.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
News Corp has a quarterly revenue of around 8 billion dollars [google.com] but their net income has been steadily declining (duh).
Has it?
From the article titled "News Corp profit doubles despite MySpace charge"
The charge on News Corp’s digital media group came after MySpace cut half its staff and marred otherwise strong results in which rising cable and broadcast television profits more than offset declines in film and digital media.
Net income for the fiscal second quarter more than doubled to $642m, or 24 cents per share, from $254m, or 10 cents, a year earlier, when results included a $500m litigation settlement. Excluding one-offs, adjusted earnings per share rose 16 per cent from 25 cents to 29 cents.
Although I think the rest of your comment is spot on.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
News Corp has been successful ... with the digital editions of the Wall Street Journal. Which is the value of their purchase of Dow Jones a number of years ago. People will pay a premium even on the internet for specialized business news. Pearson makes money from the Financial Times, and Bloomberg makes money off its terminals and various internet-delivered equivalents.
That is NOT a mass-market approach. Digital subscriptions to the WSJ, or FT, or Bloomberg, are pricey. Pricier even than the NYT digital subscription. And the Ipad is a not a mass-market device (too pricey, too limited). That's OK.
Murdoch has been pretty clear in his strategy. He wants to create a beta version of a daily newspaper that charges somewhat premium prices and will eventually migrate to Smart phones and cheap tablet devices. The Ipad is merely the first step. Can a business sell premium content at premium prices? The WSJ, FT, and Bloomberg all suggest, YES!
the problem with The Daily isn't the business model. 99c an issue or 40 bucks a year is a pretty sound pricing plan, however, what the author fails to mention is that similar plans for paid content works in other contexts, and will work for online journalism. Having to compete with free isn't difficult, it's having actual, content to want to go to from week to week to week.
Had this been another media outlet that might be able to command money for it's content, this would be a different conversation. However, I fail to see how Rupert Murdoch could assemble any team of content producers who could make this venture worth while. I often see Rupert Murdoch's name bandied about but he's the behind the scenes business geek. He's not an author. He doesn't produce content. Where's the content?
I love the iPad, don't get me wrong, however, I don't see how that and that alone are what's going to sell The Daily.
Mr. Murdoch, who's writing for this damn thing?!
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
...reading this article?
It's written by some random blogger who doesn't appear to have credentials in analysis of journalism trends, and all he really does is prognosticate doom and gloom for a new product without (a) evidence to indicate imminent failure or (b) allowing the new product to test itself in the marketplace. I could get the same level and quality of information from reading the comments to the /. thread that reported on The Daily going live in the first place.
it's just going to go the way of the ipod and the iphone.
wait, what?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
They are the same old model in a new package..
The Apple comment further mystifies me. While terrible that they should lose so much money to Apple, it does give Apple incentive to see this succeed since it's designed for their product. So consider first how amazing Apple is at promoting products and how terribly backward News Corp has been as of late. It might turn out to be a paltry sum to have Apple selling their product with interest of seeing it succeed.
On the contrary, I don't think Apple really cares about this News Corp deal. The 50% premium (versus their typical 30%) is probably made up of promotional fees, and perhaps to offset the revenue that Apple won't be getting via advertising. (though unlikely, as they won't take down other apps for not using iAd) Apple only needs for users to click on their iAds and purchase apps -- any apps -- regardless of where they're from.
Unrelated, but even though I'd never use The Daily in a million years, I could see it having an audience with iPad fanatics who:
- Don't like loading times
- Don't have the time or willpower (or give enough of a damn) to search multiple sources
- Are casual news junkies
I can also see the retro-futuristic appeal to multimedia newspapers. I'm a bit neutral in regards to its long term success, but isn't it a bit early to be writing the epitaph?
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
Who is rsmiller510 and why do we care?
I find it a little strange that Rupert Murdoch, who every self-respecting left-leaning individual loathes, would be launching an online-only newspaper exclusively available to Apple users who, in my own experience, are overwhelmingly lefty. It will probably cause some serious cognitive dissonance among liberal Steve Jobs idolizers. "It's on the iPad so I should be excited about it, but it's run by Rupert Murdoch so isn't it just iFoxNews?" (Cue head explosion.)
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Viewers appreciate a variety of editorial stances. A single editorial source, regardless of journalist/commentator. In News Corp's world, journalism and comment are smeared together and heavily biased, as is well-known. So nobody thinks this is "all the news" from the start. Expanding on this, the very reason we enjoy the internet is the diverse sources of differing opinions, watching the sway of fact/proof overcome any information filter from a single source.
Once viewers of the NewsCorp padzine find that they are "getting more" about a story by going to the web, they may realize that it doesn't require a dollar to read free information, and laden with advertisements.
What people should do is get an offline caching tool for news sites they enjoy, and essentially have a pad device spider them and serve them up locally. By just pointing to the domain (and directing some of the interest, like "all sports, politics" "no cooking, weather") someone could sell this app and make some $, IMO. Just a placeholder server while offline, waiting for the bandwidth to catch up. Add in a few goodies like capture-while-you-sleep and update-with-live in-place, and you've got a nice app.
then again maybe not. http://www.google.com.br/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=blog+sold+to
I often wonder how much longer magazines like Asimovs or Analog can last. They still charge $36 a year, even if you order the e-edition. I like the content but if they are not going to give me a rebate, then I might as well order the Paper version (which I can resell later on ebay for ~$10).
I also wonder if Books are doomed. I see amazon is selling The Golden Age of Science Fiction (50 Short Stories + 7 novels), volumes 1-10 for $2 each. Why pay full price for the physical books when I can get the same content downloaded to my Kindle or PC for about the same cost as a 2 candybars?
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
How can you say that? It's for the iPad! everything for the iPad is cool!. Oh. Wait. It's from NewsCorp. Everything from NewsCorp is vile and dorky. Arrgh! The cognitive dissonance! It hurts!
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Traditional newspapers are failing because the content is freely available online, therefore The Daily will fail, right?
The music industry started to lose profits when their content was freely available online. Many predicted the end of the big record companies.
However when the iTunes store came around, it did not fail.
It gave people the content they wanted at a low price and in a convenient format.
The Daily is trying to become the iTunes of news. Whether or not it will work is up in the air, but to dismiss it after a day is foolish.
wait, you mean a limited digital magazine can't compete with the entire internet? This is the kind of news I come to slashdot for.
Everyday You see me is the worst day of my life -Office Space
Thanks for telling me what to think about The Daily, Slashdot! Now I don't have to check it out and make a judgement for myself like an intelligent human.
I'll just file this article away next to the "iMac is doomed," "iPod is doomed," "iPod nano is doomed, and "iPad is doomed," articles from Slashdot's past.
The precise appeal is that it's an "old model" in a "new package". This is why it can succeed, if people are interested in its content to begin with. Most "online news media" stinks in its current form (gaudy, ugly, disorganized web sites). "The Daily" is an example of news in a format people actually enjoy reading - more like a printed magazine - unlike web pages. You can count me on board (with the concept, not necessarily this particular publication).
Oh, and it's not entirely "old model". The old model (print) can't provide things like links to other content or embed audio/video or 3D objects, etc.
I received an e-reader (not Kindle) as a gift, and I read a lot of print books still.
For one, I'd rather have the physical book to pass along to others for free when I'm done.
Secondly, the cost of e-books doesn't represent much (or any) savings over new paperbacks.
Third, I never buy new books - amazon itself clears jillions of used/like new books so almost all my reading is already basically free.
What is there to stop them from applying this to the Wall Street Journal on RIM's new platform and/or Android?
Guys like Miller fail to see that while this may not recapture the glory days of newspaper publishing, it presents an advertising opportunity that is head and shoulders above running just a website.
If Murdoch were truly evil, what he'd do is turn it into a mini-ecommerce platform by allowing advertisers to directly link their ads to an affiliate program that pays News Corp so that readers could buy the advertised product in one click in the app.
It quote my wife ... "I Like the smell and feel of books. I like flipping paper pages. Reading an ebook would be about as fulfilling as having a McDonalds Hamburger instead of one made fresh by a chef."
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
... but where it fails is the business model. It assumes that people are willing to pay to access a single aggregation service when so many already exist free of charge. Ever wonder why music and video piracy is so rampant? Yeah, internet users like their free stuff. So given a choice between a 99 cents a week or a zero cents a week price point, most will just take the latter while wondering why the former would even exist.
Well it seems Apple gets their 30% cut for implementing the billing and subscription service as well as the content delivery. That's probably a sensible decision - rather than building such a system themselves they outsourced it to a company which has a lot of experience in that field. Also since Apple is paid by getting a cut, they pass part of the risk of the project to them.
The price point of 99 cent / week might be the right range as well. It's something you might spend just for the coolness of it - and it does look cool, though not revolutionary. Personally I just don't see myself buying an iPad or reading a Murdoch rag, though.
The app itself is quite nice, one of the better news-type media experiences I have had on my iPad so far... If it does fail, I hope other developers can deliver similar content in a future app (and sure, free would be nice, but I think its worth the cup of coffee price as-is).
As a counter example, Charlie Sheen, being rich and famous, could easily get fairly high quality sex for free, and yet he still pays upwards of $20,000 a night for y porn star prostitutes.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I think Murdoch mentioned that it would break even at 500k subscribers. I don't think that this will reverse the general decline in newspaper revenues, but reaching break-even or profitability on the app looks pretty easy.
But staying at break even may be harder. iPad fans are always looking for some use for their devices other than checking facebook every 15 minutes, and are easily lured away by what ever is next. Many users find they are bored with the iPad and use it less and less each month.
So will these people continue to pay for news when they find that they use Google News or some other aggregation service more frequently? Will they drop their local news paper and plow the money into Murdoch's opinion about what matters?
I don't think so. Its yet another passing iPad Fad, that people will tire of paying for.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Instead of being apples bitch, how about releasing it as epub or as PDF so you can have EVERYONE as a reader instead of only a small segment?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Anyone willing to pay can have a peek.
Buh bye Rupert.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"It might turn out to be a paltry sum to have Apple selling their product with interest of seeing it succeed."
I thought News Corp said Apple was taking 30% cut, not 50%...I know that you were only quoting, but 30% is a LOT less than half.
Even so, I delivered newspapers as a kid...from the time I was 11 til I was 15, I had a newspaper route and made a LOT of money. Why? Because as a paperboy, you are technically an independent carrier, and you have to buy the papers from the publisher -- and you mark them up 100% from your wholesale costs. A $0.50 paper cost me $0.25...
Hell, the markup was good enough that when I took vacations or needed help from another paperboy, I just upped my order to the point that instead of telling the other paperboy my customers (and potentially letting them steal them) -- I just bought enough for EVERYONE in my area and told him to deliver every single home. During subscription times when we would get prizes for signing up the most people -- I realized that I could sign someone up for two weeks, get my $5 bonus per person -- and cancel them when it was over and make even greater profit (I ended up winning two trips to disneyland, deliveryperson of the year, as well as almost $10k worth of cash prizes over the 4 years because of this).
What is the point? 30% is not a lot for these companies to get their media -- and their advertisements into the hands of readers. Even at 50%, which I made as a youth (and trust me, I didn't have the pull Apple does) -- they were making money.
Considering the fact that most of the money in this business comes from advertising -- the only real reason you have to pay at all is that the advertisers want to ensure they are putting their products in front of people that actually buy products...not deadbeats.
The only thing holding me back from buying a subscription to this is that it requires me to have an internet connection when I open the app. Rumor is (maybe confirmed yesterday?) that the next OS is going to allow scheduled / background downloads of content like this...and if that happens, I'll probably front for a couple of week to see how well I like it. So far, it seems like a pretty decent magazine. The photojournalism so far is great and is perfect for the medium. Hell, there were a few things I didn't even realize until the second time around (i.e., a few of the photos were panoramic if you touched it)...I'm a huge fan of the Big Picture, and these photos were similar to the ones there...worth paying for just that alone.
Might be the first paper I've subscribed to in years...
Worlds apart in ideas but very close names. John Stewart should sue News Corp, make Murdock bleed a little more.
Let's see, a guy who tries to make a living providing information in a certain format thinks an alternative format is doomed to fail.
I'm not sure how this is different than all those "TV broadcaster says blogs are doomed to fail" items which Slashdot loves to snicker at ....
People are still buying magazines off the newsracks. Hell, I still do it. Why? Because the content is generally richer than what I can get on the average blog-like internet infotainment site. Editorial effort will do that for you.
So Miller has it exactly backwards. The Internet doesn't want more of what HE is selling, which is web-2.0 gibbering from unvetted writers who've had no discussions of the subject or goal with anyone else before writing the story. It wants professional-quality content, and may be willing to pay enough for it to keep a web-magazine format website going.
And the Internet does give the magazine's publisher massive efficiencies he'd never get from a printed medium. There's no unit cost to speak of; and production is cheaper. Once a page is written and layed out, it's done. Software can do the compositing as the writer enters the text and pictures and links and videos. Whole departments, and tons of man-hours and delay-hours, wiped out of the cost structure.
That leaves some overhead for technical operations, the occasional redesign of the format, and the continuing costs of the productive personnel: the editors and writers and photographers and video teams. Now that it's here, it will be much cheaper to keep it alive than if it were a paper thing.
And he's got Fox News to drive people to it. And you know their viewers will bite.
Haters gonna hate!
If these guys really believe in capitalism as purported, then it isn't my or any other person's or even Apple's problem for News Corp to make money on anything let alone an iPad app. If these guys really believe in capitalism as purported, News Corp or Murdoch may recognize a demand but have no way to capitalize on it today then it isn't our problem to solve either where both we or Apple should be free to walk away from what News Corp wants to do if they think it is a bad idea or bad deal. Failing to make money is a normal part how capitalism works were laying the blame at the feet of others is not interesting if one really believes in the virtues of capitalism.
But this is something that has always bothered me about Murdoch. Those conservative values are near and dear and paramount and we will beat that drum and sing those praises about them...until those values work against us then it is entirely utterly unfair and not our fault. If it turns out this time the market is working against News Corp, it is a good time for News Corp should rethink their strategy instead of News Corp crying we and Apple rethink ours. It is not our or Apple's problem that News Corps sunk $30M US plus $500k US a week into something where telling us and Apple how wrong we are flies in the face of capitalism.
Then your wife is a silly. It's more like eating a gourmet meal in McDonalds instead of a fancy restaurant - the content is the same, but the surroundings are different. Some of us read books for the actual words in them rather than the appearance of being so intellectual.
Perhaps your wife doesn't like to read, just to be seen to be reading. I pity her.
It was doomed to fail the moment they decided it was only iPAD.
Why limit your audience in that way?
I find being offended by me offensive.
I like to leave them in there for guests to read too.
I just don't see buying an iPad or other e-reader just to keep in each bathroom of the house for 'library time'.
Not only that...magazines like Men's Health...I like the pull-outs you can get that have new exercise routines to try...and with things like Bon Appetit or other cooking magazines,, I often clip out recipes I want to try, and if they work well, I paste these into my personal cookbook. Kinda hard to do that with e-readers. I do keep a laptop just for the kitchen...to look things up on the web from....but for the most part, things I'm gonna use a lot, (recipes, workouts)..I like to have hard print copies.
Hell, even at work...if it is a document I'll be using a lot...I print out hard copies to mark up, etc....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Many products succeed when they are re-packaged. If Most Americans are getting their news from the web, what exactly is the difference?...well the app costs money of course, but 99 cents a week? If the app is good enough, people will pay ah la fart-app... impulse buy. I think you'll see the price drop or a micro-subscription whereby ppl turn it on and off for a week. I know I might pay for it, if: 1) It had the content and the features 2) I had the time to read it!
I pity you, as you believe McDonald's serves gourmet meals. Also, you obviously have no fond memories of reading actual, physical books. Archangel Michael's wife obviously does.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's funny you should make that assertion! Too bad it's completely baseless.
From the link I just provided: "77.6 percent of the users found their iPad usage went up after their initial “honeymoon” period."
That doesn't mean *this app* will be successful, but it certainly won't fail for the reason you suggest.
Or, even more obvious, it could be that she likes a physical object over a virtual one. When the batteries are dead on your Kindle, you can still read a book. I too prefer physical books over an e-book, but still read both. I also buy and sell used books because I read a lot, and pick up lots of books at garage/estate sales and Goodwill stores for very cheap. Try finding 4 mainstream fiction kindle books for a dollar.
"But this one goes to 11!"
It will also improve the experience for people dining out or flying on airplanes...won't have to be annoyed or distracted by screaming kids that the parent refuse to calm and make obey.
Is this vat process you mentioned already in development?? Talk about a $1M idea!!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The article incorrectly claims Apple takes half the revenue. I believe this new recurring micropayment model (maybe the most innovative feature of The Daily) will become popular with other iPad magazine apps like the Economist, Time etc... This new subscription model, so hated by free as in beer folks, is the real news. iPad's are meant to be consumer devices, and we may see that consumers embrace this new approach even if the hard core tech community does not.
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
Yeah..but with the high end prostitutes...you get exactly what you want when you want it, how you want it...and best of all, when done, they go HOME!!
The 'free' women..well, they want to stick around, marry you and take half your shit when done. And if you think about it...getting laid or having a woman is NEVER free.
You pay for it one way or another. At least they way Charlie's doing it...he's paying a set fee upfront as opposed to God know's how much for the 'free' ones over a period of time.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Regardless, if I've learned one thing from Microsoft and their initial XBox and Zune attempts, it's that a very very wealthy company that wants to shove something down the consumer's maw will not let up until it has turned a profit. The problem is that News Corp has what, eight billion sitting around in cash? Let the blood letting begin with this pin prick!
Reminds me of the scene in Citizen Kane where the banker tries to lecture Kane about loosing money in his newspaper, and Kane says that at the rate he's going, he can burn until he's dead!
No, I will not work for your startup
It is a pity that you mistake gourmet with just eating. Real Gourmet is about the experience as much as food. Silver forks, crystal wine glasses, table cloths, candles ...
It is a pity that you don't understand the principle. It is impossible to have a Gourmet Meal in a McDonald's Restaurant.
Let me put it this way, would you eat all your meals in the bathroom? Why not? After all, it is the same food you'd eat at the dinner table?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
I guess NewsCorp will next have an Android app, then a version that works on the display in a Chevy Volt, and another for the new 3D TVs. I guess they don't have advertising in the iPad version...right? They need that 99 cents to pay for the entire thing.
What ever happened to the concept of giving people what they want and making money on the advertising? My local newspaper drops a free copy in my driveway because their subscriptions are low and they have to justify the delivery of the free paper to their advertisers or else they wouldn't make any money at all.
Quoting Chef from South Park are we? What you say is certainly true for most of us, but someone of Charlie Sheen's status can get no strings attached groupies any time he wants.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Unfortunately ebooks are often *more* expensive than physical books. Worse yet, people are apparently willing to pay that price so the situation will just continue (or get worse).
I also wonder if Books are doomed. I see amazon is selling The Golden Age of Science Fiction (50 Short Stories + 7 novels), volumes 1-10 for $2 each. Why pay full price for the physical books when I can get the same content downloaded to my Kindle or PC for about the same cost as a 2 candybars?
Have you checked the price on new books, though?
Don't get me wrong, I love my Kindle for the many small conveniences that it offers (which all add up), but book pricing is not one of them.
He never said that McDonald's serves gourmet meals.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
Just as the popular newspaper iPad/iPhone/Android applications like the evening standard and metro have failed in the UK.
No. Wait. It's handy to have the full news disconnected from the web so you can read it when you are out of range, as happens a lot when you're on the tube. I'm sure that there will be enough people willing to pay the small weekly fee for this product as well.
My mistake, he obviously meant buying a gourmet meal from someplace else, taking it into McDonalds and eating it there. How silly of me to fail to understand the very common scenario he was talking about. Why, just last week the wife and I bought gourmet meals from the local french bistro and took them into a nearby McDonalds to eat.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Seriously, why does this have to be an app?
Smartphones and tablets have browsers, why spend all this time and effort on something that can't be used by all of them.
$30 Million to make it, $500K a week to run , yet Murdoch's papers already have websites. And they don't have to pay Apple 30% for them.
Oh well, we've have the dotcom bubble, then the web2.0 bubble, Ladies and Gentlemen welcome to the 'app bubble' where every other company will soon be making crappy pointless apps and shouting 'me too!'
I've actually started buying the used selections on amazon. A hardback + shipping from a used vendor can be less than a new paperback + free shipping from amazon.
Yeah..but with the high end prostitutes...you get exactly what you want when you want it, how you want it...and best of all, when done, they go HOME!!
That's it right there, although in my case I'm the one going home. I have large gaps between relationships (I am admittedly not easy to get along with) and in those gaps there are a couple local independent escorts I frequent, although I don't spend Charlie Sheen levels of money. Actually, I get a great rate for being a regular, and for my birthday I can see them both at the same time (they are good friends, and enjoy partying with each other). Anyone who looks down their nose at me for this is invited to suck out my farts, stuff their petty little moralizing up their ass and basically drop dead.
Maybe. Or maybe we see the headline in The Enquirer about some groupie saying she had Sheen's baby and is lawyered up. Nah. Stick with the professionals.
The thing that most people are missing is that The Daily is cheap. $3.96 a month is less than the cost of a large cup of takeaway coffee. At that price, it doesn't need to be spectacularly better than the free content on the internet, it just needs to be slightly better for it to be appealing.
Compare that to the cost of a Times subscription on a UK Kindle, which costs £9.99 a month, and that's still less than half the cost of a dead tree, postal subscription. And these papers typically cost per daily issue what The Daily costs per week.
Paid Subscription. Less Content than Reeder. Lame
Murdoch may be the Devil, but the Devil has the resources to tempt us. The Daily's content and supposed politics may not be to everyone's taste and yet the app itself is something new in at least three ways:
It is probably the most beautifully designed and executed digital media ever - check out that full page picture of the cute little ground hog with the cutting edge headline font and text overlaid. (...and not an ad in site!)
It makes use of the iPad's advantages over Web 2.0. Maybe HTML5 et al will catch up, but can you point out any web content that swirls and zooms a picture of today's snow storm cover story when you open the front page? (BTW this failed earlier today and was fixed by a pushed download). And until you have a tablet, I don't think you appreciate how enjoyable high res video is to hold in your hand. And if you don't want to see content, just flick your thumb and up comes another page - just like a magazine - no mousing required.
The groundbreaking micro payment recurring subscription model may actually become the new norm for big sites. 99 cents a week, 29 cents, 19 cents: some price will work for real content creators, won it? This is big. Watch a lot of publishers follow the model.
Finally, try to resist the urge to criticize something based on it's source. I'm writing this on an iPad after two days of reading The Daily. Don't knee-jerk hate me, either. The Daily may be the first of a slew of beautiful new bright shiny objects (this one from the Devil, in many's opinion... LOL).
But I'm willing to admit I'm jealous. I want the template app for my websites!
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
If you've looked at the app, and think you can come even close to copying it quickly with a small team then contact me.
A CMS template app that approximates the Daily would be a winner...
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
http://thedailyindexed.tumblr.com/
See, the whole thing is actually a web site. When you pay 99c for the app on the iPad, you're buying a nice index.
Go through the indexed pages. Can you find me one story that's worth paying for, that offers value unavailable elsewhere?
http://rocknerd.co.uk
re: News Corps "declining income", those (8 billion US Q.) figures look if anything a little understated to me - cash cows like Sky UK alone (last 6 months, revenues up 15 per cent to £3.2 billion, Profits up 26% at £467 million - note, that is 6 months, and UK quids..) mean it will be a while yet before he lands before the Bankruptcy Courts.
The rest, I would agree. Murdoch can well afford to run crappy iPad iNews iVentures, and keep doing so until he finds the magic alchemy that pays. FWIW, like his paywell experiments, Times.co.uk etc., I don't personally see The Daily as being a goer either, however, there are problems here (Traditional Print is dying & no-one is prepared to pay for online access while everybody elses site is free) that *someone* is eventually gonna have to resolve.
Amazing.
Someone found that all the articles in The Daily are also available online... but they didn't' create a TOC, so he went and did that.
Wonder how long that ends up lasting...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
LOL. I'd probably recommend s/mass people/the mainstream, but "mass people" has a funny and truthful ring to it when it concerns we Americans.
Honestly, I think "the mainstream" is going to die with the baby boom. The generations that follow are not nearly so uniform. Lucky we have this Internet thing to deliver to us our own private truth.
but wait, when a newspaper or magazine is put onto the ipad shouldn't it become something else? something magical and fun and exciting?
i'm assuming here that CmdrTaco has some monetary based link to this blogger, otherwise this must the slowest news day ever
Apple's mobile devices have what, twenty percent of the market and falling? I made up the number, but don't tell me it isn't small and falling.
If this is Murdoch's plan, he can remain a big fish, but it'll be a damn small pond he's in. "iPad newspaper" is a synonym for "obscure service that hardly anyone bothers to get access to." Newscorp: the new CompuServe.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Why? Why indeed. Apple's iTunes made $1.1 billion in the first quarter. Now why would anyone want to make a piece of that money? Because they can?
Should there be a Law?
I also wonder if Books are doomed. I see amazon is selling The Golden Age of Science Fiction (50 Short Stories + 7 novels), volumes 1-10 for $2 each. Why pay full price for the physical books when I can get the same content downloaded to my Kindle or PC for about the same cost as a 2 candybars?
Some of us love to read and hold paper. Others have difficulty viewing monitors. And they require electricity. None is needed for me to read a magazine or book.
They still charge $36 a year, even if you order the e-edition.
I might pay more for both paper and online editions.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Hmm, Fox's censorship/re-writing of history combined with Apple's draconian, closed environment. Um, no thanks.
I believe Fox News Channel lost large amounts of money for several years before it finally became profitable. Same think could happen here.
will become popular with other iPad magazine apps like the Economist
At $1 per issue I'd be tempted to subscribe to the Economist. Make it $2 for both electronic and print editions and I'd be more likely to subscribe.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
All this poo pooing sounds familiar
Forget that it is fox for a second, and look at the big picture. Cheap magazine subscriptions wihtout needing to get them in the post or making a trip to the news agency = win.
Newscorp crap notwithstanding, this sort of thing is imho the "killer app" that the ipad has been waiting for.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
A lot of what makes papers such as the New York Times valuable is not its coverage of events, but its investigations. And these investigations aren't usually the types that first come to mind; you know, uncovering crime, corruption, or the story behind the story. Most investigations are about exposing trends.
It's this is valuable and unique material that could carry a subscription. Its uniqueness means that if others cover it briefly then a click through to the original source is quite likely, while if others cover it in more detail then there would be a case for syndication fees or some other form of revenue sharing.
The Daily looks to be ignoring this lesson in mainly covering events and political manoeuvring.
In the video attached to TFA I only spotted one possible ad. It was static and full-screen. Will subscribers put up with auto-activated animated or audio ads?
... News Corp has what, eight billion sitting around in cash?
Uh compare that to Apple's own cash reserves (about $40B or 5 times News Corp,) and you'll see that News Corp needs to hitch their wagon to Apple's star.
I'm not going to predict Rupert Murdoch's defeat quite yet.
But I am definitely predicting a change in writing style (from the NY Post to the Wall Street Journal.)
Mr. Murdoch is not an idiot. Any resemblance to W. R. Hurst is entirely coincidental.
Apple's iPad is an upscale, upmarket device and I fully expect the $500,000 per week spent in assembling "The Daily" will not be spent foolishly.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
"I think it's only a matter of time between the news cycle starts turning all "Apple the subject of antitrust laws?" or the classic "Should Apple be broken up?".
Google is waiting in the wings and has much more market cap and market cred that Apple does. Apple has too much competition on all fronts.
(The fact that these people think that putting unattractively colored plastic panels on the same old industrial rack-frame was suddenly going to transform a generic box computer into an iMac just shows that the competition is not very good. [Apple is a consumer product company. /. readers' boxes are still made with PS2 keyboard and mouse ports. Apple moves on while PC box makers are the most unimaginative, risk-averse accountants {successful survivors of the commoditization wars} that China and Taiwan have to offer.])
The media people are praying for Rupert Murdoch to have found the " magic bullet " that allows them to shed the costs of owning and operating a printing press in a world that is increasingly eschewing paper, and lets them runs purely as news aggregators with their own slant/market place.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
To be fair, the Xbox was actually pretty good, and the 360 earned its place in gaming by being great. The Zune is probably *currently* profitable, as it's just one of many brands of passably successful MP3 players, though nothing will make up for those initial media buys. You'll notice MSN & Microsoft Virtual Earth are just websites now, and Plays-4-Sure + Web TV are dead.
The ______ Agenda
Oh cut the crap. You're just saying that making choices means making choices. That is, whenever you do A, that always means not doing not-A.
Most couples are both *better* off financially than singles. Especially the childless. For the fairly simple reason that 2 people don't have double costs, but -do- have (aproximately) double earning-potential.
My instinct is that this version of 'putting a 20th century model in a 21st century package' is problematic because it essentially wastes so very much potential in that 21st century package. Consider it like using the TV to air radio drama, with all the actors standing around in a sound stage and reading from scripts, instead of acting out their story. Some kid somewhere, or some start-up with no assumptions and only half a clue is going to figure out some new and fantastic way of using tablets to deliver content that is unique to its technology, if they haven't already. Where The Daily's value comes in is that it, like most of the News Corp products, is targeted towards a demographic that is somewhat resistant to change. There's a reason Glenn Beck's set looks like Archie Bunker's living room. It's irrelevant to the content he delivers but the visual cues provide an air of the familiar that a more technologically-advanced set couldn't do. The Daily presents its content in a way that turns the ipad into a magazine without pages, but something that still functions like something that you flip through in the doctor's office. Granny might not get 3-axis gyroscope sensing, but she can still lick her finger and 'turn' a page. Chances are, it'll hang on long enough for some upstart to figure out a better way, then it will copycat and reverse engineer and attempt to take over the market, maybe successfully, maybe not so much.
I dont think you really read what you posted. Last year, they had profits of $254m, including a $500m litigation settlement. That means that their 'real' profit for the quarter, without the arbitrary cost of the settlement, was $754m. This year, they made $642m.
$754m > $642m
They made $100m less in profit the quarter versus the same quarter last year. Their profits are going down.
Yeah, BUT...you have to hook up with a chick that
A. Wants to work
B. Has potential to actually earn decent money...something beyond retail sales, or waiting tables.
And...if she pops out a kid, kiss that income good-bye for awhile....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
In large parts of the world, including USA and Europe, women are on the average -more- educated than men. As for kids, that's entirely unrelated. It's true that having kids cost money, and typically lowers income. (how much, depends on the jurisdiction - remember that *every* first-world country except USA has paid maternity-leave for everyone, here in Norway you get 80% of your former salary for slightly over a year at home with the baby - that means you basically lose very little income (though costs DO increase))
We've got 3 kids, the oldest being 6, yet despite it, I'm much better off financially than I could ever hope to be if I was single.
The submitter is the author of the article, and the article is little more than the equivalent of a typical slashdot comment along the lines of "this is nothing new and it won't work." He completes the cynical-slashdot-post meme by being careful to include a factual error. Though his is a bit more obvious than it could have been had he taken more time to craft it.