Feb. 2 was a big day for News Corp CEO and chairman, Rupert Murdoch — his long awaited digital-only newspaper The Daily went live.
I have long been fascinated by Murdoch. For the most part I neither agree nor disagree with his viewpoints, rather I just enjoy hearing what he’s saying. As a journalism major, I have heard all about the death of newspapers and the newspaper industry … the end of ‘real’ journalism. I feel for Murdoch in this respect since newspapers are all he knows.
Murdoch is notorious for battling the Internet and Internet search engines over his belief they are “stealing his content” and posting it to the web for free. Last year Murdoch publicly claimed “the aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content” (Newsweek). Many saw this is a feeble attempt for Murdoch to get “a piece of Google’s pie,” arguing that if Murdoch was really convinced that Google was stealing his content he would stop allowing the search engine to link to his stories (Newsweek).
Around the same time Murdoch was attacking Google in the press, he was also hailing the advent of the iPad, and asserting that it could potentially save the newspaper industry by “making it cheaper to distribute content to a broader audience” (The Australian). Murdoch believed the i-Pad would make it easier to implement paywalls and charge for digital editions of his magazine.
Fast forward a few months and here we are — Murdoch has created a digital newspaper solely to be used on the iPad. The Daily will cost 99 cents per week, and provide subscribers with about 100 pages of content every day. Murdoch told reporters that The Daily was a logical step because “new times demand new journalism” (Yahoo!News). The Daily gives readers the ability to view content that is of interest to them, and is interactive and engaging.
Reactions to Murdoch’s new newspaper are mixed. Critics are skeptical, fearing that The Daily has not embraced any key aspects of the Internet, and is merely a regular newspaper, online. For example, Larry Magid from The Huffington Post said, “The company says it plans to update the online newspaper throughout the day, but there was no evidence of that on day one. The cover story, ‘Falling Pharaoh,’ did a pretty good job of covering yesterday’s news…” and “as I was reading (The Daily), TV and radio news and all of the web-based news services were telling today’s news” (MediaLife Magazine).
Supporters of The Daily are optimistic about the possibilities it poses for newspaper companies. Recently, I attended a lecture at Cal Poly for the graphic communication department’s “Print Week” given by Joe Vincent of Dow Jones. Vincent sang the iPad’s praises, and echoed Murdoch’s sentiment that devices like the iPad would make the prevalence and popularity of digital newspapers more common because it gives readers the ability to view a ‘lifelike’ newspaper while providing the modern convenience of mobile technology (speaking mainly with regards to The Wall Street Journal).
It’s too soon to tell if the iPad can really “save” newspapers, but it’s too soon for newspapers to throw in the towel also. In any case, journalism will survive, and news and the truth will remain a priority.