Kitcatt Nohr Digitas

Brave, but is it really game changing?

I'm itching to try this out. Not sure when it hits the UK.

From the look of the demo the design and UI look exciting. They've used Apple's cover flow to show the newspapers contents which is a clever alternative to the tiny thumbnails other magazines provide and there are a load of flicks and tricks like saving articles and panoramic photos.

There's also some social functionality including the ability to share articles. This is pretty brave for a subscription based app, although I gather sharing is pretty limited.

Will it change the face of newspapers forever? I'm not sure I agree with you here Simon. 'The Daily' looks like a modern makeover of a standard newspaper. Daily news seems very old fashioned when you compare it to the up to the second news streams we all tap into now.

Compare this to Flipboard which gives the user full curatorial control, fully integrated social functionality and the ability to pull in live streams of high quality content, and it doesn't look quite so game changing. Oh and its free.

The Daily's price tag is much more appealing than other magazine apps and I think people will be more open to micro payments like these, however at the end of the day it will all be down to the quality of the journalism. This will have to be spectacular to retain subscribers and the paper will have to discover a strong editorial voice which might mean narrowing its audience from "anyone with an iPad".

Whatever happens its going to be fascinating to watch.

It's a newspaper...

I think we have to look at this in light of the position of newspaper publishing today. That's certainly how Mr Murdoch is looking at it, because that's the business he is in. And the newspaper publishing business is essentially toast. The Times alone has lost hundreds of millions of pounds over the last two years, and its paywall experiment has tanked completely.

The two things that are killing offline newspapers are 1) the disappearance of the classified advertising market 2) the incredible fixed costs involved in printing and distributing newspapers (the best estimate has the cost of printing and distributing the New York Times at more than £300m a year).

Obviously, classifieds aren't ever coming back. But if you could drive out the fixed costs, then maybe the newspaper business could function profitably. It's a gamble for Mr M, but then gambling's what he's always done.

And remember, he's playing in the USA, which has never had a national daily newspaper. So he's got a niche. And he's got access to the best possible distribution network with the App Store.

But I agree with you Gus that the threats he faces are mainly from self-curated apps like Flipbook, that enable you to filter out everything you're not interested in.

But they aren't newspapers. And this is.

And that's its problem

Driving down fixed costs is smart and even Murdoch’s small army of journalists will be a fraction of the overhead that printed papers require. However the third major reason newspapers are dying is the web and no amount of fixed cost saving will remove the reality of people finding good journalism elsewhere for free.

The Daily's success can't be judged within the narrow confines of the newspaper publishing industry alone. You've got to evaluate it against blogs, twitter feeds and all the tools that aggregate free news content and deliver it back to us in innovative ways. These are the modern newspapers and they give us a diversity of sources, real time updates, curatorial control, quality journalism, for no cost. How can another newspaper possibly compete?

By making money, dear Lisa

All of the fabulous innovations you list have one thing in common: they are unprofitable. As is almost everything on the internet. Because with the exception of shops, the internet pretty much only works when it's free.

That's fabulous for us as punters. But it's one of the reasons Warren Buffet describes the internet as a 'net negative' for capitalists. And it's the topic at the heart of Chris Anderson's book 'Free'. He's the editor of Wired, so he ought to know.

What Mr Murdoch is trying to do is create an online news property that makes money. No one else has ever done it, outside of very specialised areas of publishing. So it is going to look unlikely from our perspective as web users.

However, he is taking a model from the offline world that he knows can work: the daily newspaper. And he's doing it in a market that's never had a unified daily paper: America.

So he's got a chance, at least.

And his masterstroke is to have got it in the world's biggest and most successful shop: the App Store.

Mashable doesn't like it, because it isn't engineered to fit the way people interact with their iPad. Principally because it is going to be updated at times when most people aren't looking at their iPad - which is seen as something you use at home.

But that's another story...

I love your discussion

So, two competing arguments are: Daily will be successful beacuse it is the first 'proper' daily newspaper in USA vs. it won't because people won't pay for news content online. It's an interesting one. iPad part of it is a red herring, in my opinion, as I share the arguments above.

I am more inclined to the other one, as I too think that there are great news sources online already and Daily doesn't change anything in the usage mode, apart that it is on iPad and it looks like a printed paper.

Whether people will pay BECAUSE it's on iPad? We'll see, but I won't bet that this would generate enough paid users to make money. On the other hand, there is supposed to be 40 mil. iPad owners by the and of the year, so who knows?

The most exciting part is the kibitz itself, if you ask me.

I'm not saying it will be a success...

But I am saying it's not the same as anything else that exists online already. It's a newspaper. America's first national daily. And it's in the App store, so it's got distribution.

But only time will tell if that will make it the first online news operation to make money.

Surely you are both missing the main point...

...which is in Simon's opening 4 words: "For 14 cents a day". The Times online sub is £2 per day. That's a significant difference and moves it from a relatively trivial cost to one you think about more carefully.

The Daily is still not free, and so that's a barrier. But free is not free when it costs you time to sift through all the garbage. The Daily only needs to find 500,000 people WORLDWIDE who think 14cents a day is worth paying to a good editor to sift, and don't need to know that a celebrity vomited over the pavement within 30 seconds of it happening.

If Murdoch was offering shares, I'd buy.

I think you're right

Mr Murdoch usually does his sums, and these have a chance of adding up. The cost is trivial - like an IKEA hotdog. People are used to paying small sums for things at the App Store, and the internet gives Mr M a potential audience of billions who might consider buying it. Especially those who are not currently provided for by online news sources and would like to read a newspaper but don't get round to buying it.