User:Lilly Caroline/sandbox

A QUICK LOOK AT THE DAILY, NEWS CORPORATION

The Daily, by the company News Corporation, is the world’s first news source that was created strictly for the use of IPad owners. The main goal of the so-called newspaper was to be an innovative and new way to experience news for apple users around the globe.

CONTENT AND CREATION OF THE FIRST IPAD ONLY NEWSPAPER

The Daily, which was a joint creation project by the News Corporations chair Rupert Murdoch, and recently passed Chief Executive of Apple, Steve Jobs, was put into the works in 2010, and was meant to be released in the United States in January 2011. However there were some delays in the production process, and the newspaper was officially released in February 2011. Along with Murdoch and Jobs heading the team, The Daily also has a squad of writers, editors, and creative directors contributing to it. Not only was months of hard work put into the creation of the app, but there was an estimated 30 million dollars put into it as well. As the creators and the team wanted The Daily to be “a new voice”, the budget was seemingly large. What the staff of the newspaper is responsible for doing is producing news story’s that are new and fresh, making the paper a reliable source. . The Daily consists of 113 pages per issues, and contains 6 sections, which are news, gossip, opinion, arts and life, apps and games, and finally sports. As it is first and foremost a source of news, 29 of these pages are dedicated strictly to news, and the other pages are covered by the other topics. To be able to use the application, one has to purchase it for a price of 99 cents per week, and each user is entitled to a free two-week trial before purchasing When creating The Daily, their focus was to produce something unique from other news sources. The content of The Daily is wide spread with an array of information and stories including top world news, sports, world entertainment, technology information, gossip and trends, and a section for subscribers views and opinions on news. Because it is an [[IPad] based product, along with providing written news coverage, it will also present its readers with video news. It is meant to have content that is compelling and really making IPad users impressed with what they are seeing. The Daily is different from a regular Internet news source because they do one large news update once a day; rather that constantly having new stories popping up. This could be viewed as a good thing by some users, and possibly a negative to others.

READING EXPERIENCE

Something to consider when purchasing the application would of course be what the experience of actually reading the material is going to be like for the subscriber. Most of the stories that can be found in The Daily will be anywhere from one to thee pages, and are broken up with photographs and captions. Some articles also have video links that can be viewed right from the article on your IPad, or can even be hooked up to apple tv and viewed there is the customer owns it. It is fairly easy to navigate your around The Daily, so when wanting to read articles from different sections, readers can do so. There is bar at the bottom of the screen that can take you to the different sections, and you can also save links and favourites here as well. Something that gave people doubts about the set up and reading experience of The Daily is that they found themselves have to constantly reload articles, and restart as the application would crash rather frequently. This is something that has been somewhat resolved since the start up, but still need more tweaking to be perfect.

READERSHIP AND ADVERTISING

Finding solid details about the readership of The Daily has been somewhat difficult to do. Many of the sources that look at progress and popularity of a source, such as PostRank, don’t necessarily track who is actually reading the material, but more so how often people are using the app, and interacting within it. When looking at The Daily from an advertising perspective, it is interesting to see what the News Corporation came up with as a way to gain money from the product. When creating the app, the producers seem to have done a fairly good job with fitting advertising into the content of the newspaper. It looks as though this is one of the things that the team has done well with. The advertising within the daily seems to follow a similar type or pattern, as most of it seems to be fairly similar in display. Obviously advertising is meant to produce profits so they had to take a proper business standpoint and make the best they could. Another aspect of the advertising scheme of the paper is that unlike a lot of online advertisements, you control when and what you are seeing, which makes it easier to get to the content. The only negative thing has so far been brought up about The Daily’s advertising, is that they are not all labeled, which could end up being an issue for the app. When looking at the application as a whole, to this point The Daily’s advertisers have come to view it as very much a tablet experiment. "I think there is a lot of value in testing and learning in tablet editions," said Robin Steinberg, exec VP at Media Vest, a unit of Publicis Groupe. "The Daily, to me, is People-meets-the New York Post; it's kind of a magazine, kind of a newspaper. They have a large user base that is daily, not weekly or monthly, with some interesting engagement metrics." As it was seen as more of a trial run or experiment, marketing reps and advertisers were eager to get a piece of The Daily when it first emerged, but the challenging part for Murdoch and his team now, is bringing them back. Many agencies are questioning whether being a part of The Daily will be good for their business in the end.

USER INTERACTION WITH THE DAILY

When looking at The Daily a little more in depth, it is good to look at how the every day users of the app interact with it. When choosing to download the app it takes approximately a minute, which is fairly fast procedure when looking at the amount of information you are about to receive. When you have completed the downloading of the application, you are first taken to the homepage, much like a newspaper webpage. The home page contains topics, photographs, and top stories that readers would be interested in, and there are a few different ways in which things can be viewed while using the app. When the app was first developed it took about five minutes to fully download the entire thing, so it can be said that improvements have been made since the initial model. Although the overall actual design, backed by created Rupert Murdoch does have some flaws that need tending to, it can be summed up with the fact that it has the autistics of a print magazine, and the readership of your daily newspaper, plus a whole bunch more and it’s all online.

RECENT STATISTICS AND SUCCESSES

As previously discussed, the creator of The Daily, who claims “new times demand new journalism”, Rupert Murdoch has put a lot of thought and work into this new super app. When the first editorial was released in February of 2011, Murdoch seemed so sure of the new app, that he bet 30 million of News Corps money that it would create a new sense of journalism and demolish the traditional idea of the door to door newspaper style that had been around for decade upon decade. The main idea was that they were building a new publication, specifically for Ipad uses, and attempting to gain paying customers through it. One of the first smart moves made by Murdoch when creating the app, was to offer the free two week trial, to allow users to give the app a test run before committing to the purchase. Since the time it was released, statistics have shown that 15% of all users who subscribe to the free trial go one to make a yearly purchase of The Daily. The total readership at this is around 120 thousand people per week, says Daily publisher Greg Clayman. Of this portion of people, almost 8- thousand are people that have actually subscribed and paid for the application, the rest taking part in the free trial period. So far leaders of the app seem pleased with these numbers. However, The Daily still has a long road ahead of them if their main goal is making a name for paid digital media. When starting the application, Murdoch stated that he thought a ballpark number of 500 subscribers would turn it from a trial application to a good business. With this being said, they entire team behind The Daily still views is as yearly process, and that it should gain readers and popularity with time. One positive reinforcement that the team has noticed so far is that more users are opting to choose the yearly subscription for just forty dollars annually, than the weekly subscription that costs ninety-nine cents. This is a good thing because it lowers the number of people who drop out of their subscriptions, as once you sign on for the yearly it is done, Clayman states. Another interesting piece of information about The Daily’s subscribers, is that they are fairly evenly dispersed throughout the United States. When launching the application, in the back of their minds the team were under the assumption that their main success would take place on the East and West Coast of the country. However after looking at statistics from the entire population, productivity seems to be fairly well dispersed throughout the entire nation. This is not to say that it is extremely high, but that it has been noticed across the country.

MURDOCH SCANDAL AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE DAILY

While Rupert Murdoch has done many great things throughout his career in this industry, including his innovative work with News Corp to create The Daily, everyone and everything seem to have a dark side in this business. In July of 2011, only months after the release of The Daily, Murdoch was the centre of a fairly serious media scandal that had come out, involving News International, a branch of News Corp. News of a phone hacking scandal involving Murdoch, his son, and many other News Corp employees, and they faced allegations that their company and reporters had been hacking the phone lines and voicemails of celebrities to get information to benefit the company. These reports were first brought to the pulic in 2005, however this past July more serious reports were leaked. It was uncovered that no only celebrity lines were hacked, but also phone lines of past soldiers, members of the British Royal family, and finally the family of a young girl who had been murdered. There was a trial this past summer to deal said allegations, and many employees of the company were both questioned, and asked to resign from their positions. Many things about the accusations were denied, but in the end both Murdoch and his son had to state formal apologies for what had happened, and to people and businesses that had been harmed because of the scandal. Whenever something like this happens to such a large corporation, it can be assumed that there will be some sort of repercussions for the organization. During the time of when the trial for the media scandal was taking place shares in the company dropped around 17%, which was at the beginning of July. However as the month ended and formal apologies had been made by many of the main people involced, mainly Murdoch, stocks began to rise again. Although this was good news for the company, there was much talk that Rupert Murdoch could potentially have to step down from his position to keep the company alive, however no such conclusion has been made at this point.

One of the main questions for IPad and Daily subscribers with this scandal, is what does it mean for The Daily and what is going to happen with the application. One important thing that happened was the resignation of James Murdoch, son of Rupert, from News Corps group Newspaper LTD. As he dealth with a lot of newspaper business within the company, this could potentially have an effect on The Daily. Another extremely important piece of information is that it was speculated that reporters for The Daily are being investigated for illegal newsgathering. As the fate of the company and the elder Murdoch have not yet been set in stone, this could also be troublesome. If Rupert Murdoch were to steph down from his position, it is unkown who would take over the job. This could make or break not only the entire empire, but The Daily and its business and readership. So far not very much has been said about the scandals effect on The Daily, as everything is being kept very private for the time being.

REVIEW AND FUTURE OF THE DAILY

When looking at The Daily, and examining what has been done and said about it during the months since its release date, it is difficult to say what the ultimate fate of the IPad only newspaper will be; whether it will be a trendsetter or not. . As soon as the app was released early this year, it was purchased by many IPad users and corporations across the United States, and right away there were mixed feelings about the product. However more people have gotten a feel for the product, and more reviews have been released, it doesn’t seem to be making the splash that the creators had predicted and hoped for. One of the main concerns of many people is the fact that The Daily is supposed to be a newspaper with viable and up to date news. However many feel this does not seem to be case. Many reviews are saying that you want breaking and up to date world news; you may be better off simply going on the browser on IPad rather than this news application itself. There is nothing to make it feel like a live digital source that one would think it might be, because of the fact there are only updates once every 24 hours, rather than say once an hour. Another issue that people are having is that the app has been introduced in more than just the United States. However, the content within it is still extremely American, which makes it hard for users in places such as the UK. Although users say that it is nice to wake up and a newspaper already on your IPad, it is hard to say whether people will continue to purchase the app, or if they will stick to the tried and true forms of news. Numbers have gone down since the introduction of the application, and unless the production team can come up with a way to keep people interested, it looks like it may not be as successful as they would have hoped.

REFERENCES

Federico Viticci, “News Corps IPad only Newspaper, The Daily, a Collaboration Between Jobs and Murdoch”, Mac Stories (November 2010) http://www.macstories.net/ipad/news-corps-ipad-only-newspaper-the-daily-a-collaboration-between-jobs-and-murdoch/ Stuart Dredge, “News Corporation’s The Daily IPad app now available in UK”, The Guardian, September 15th 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2011/sep/15/the-daily-ipad-app-uk Peter Kafka, “A Delay for the Daily: Apple, News Corp. Push Back Launch Date”, The Wall Street Journal, January 13th 2011, accessed October 11th 2001 http://allthingsd.com/20110113/a-delay-for-the-daily-apple-news-corp-push-back-launch-date/ Shane Richmond, “The Daily IPad app review; a complete failure of imagination”, The Telegraph, February 3rd 2011, accessed October 15th 2011 http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/100006286/the-daily-ipad-app-review-a-complete-failure-of-imagination/ David Chan, “IPad App Review: The Daily”, The Technorati, February 7th 2011 http://technorati.com/technology/article/ipad-app-review-the-daily/ Peter Pachal, “Hand on with The Daily, News Corp’s IPad Newspaper”, PC Magazine, February 2nd 2011, accessed October 20th 2011 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2379248,00.asp#fbid=wxdPcFNJApn Leslie Horn, “Interests in The Daily IPad app Dwindling, Analyst Says”, PC Magazine, April 6th 2011, accessed October 21st 2011. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383171,00.asp#fbid=wxdPcFNJApn Jamie Slattery, “The Daily IPad Review”, Know Your Mobile, September 15th 2011, http://www.knowyourmobile.com/appleiphone/ipad/ipad-apps/ipad-news-apps/1056317/the_daily_ipad_review.html “The Daily”, last modified October 23rd 2011. http://www.thedaily.com/ Lilly Caroline (talk) 14:29, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

1. REDIRECT thedaily.com
2. REDIRECT apple.com