Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp team unveiled the first newspaper app built solely for the iPad - The Daily.
The Daily - priced at $39.99 for a year's subscription - allows readers to fully interact with the content, including 360-degree photographs that pan and tilt, HD video, easy-to-read infographics, embedded Twitter feeds and breaking news updates as they happen.
"The Daily is not a legacy brand moving to the internet world... in this exciting new era we believe The Daily will be the model for how stories are told and consumed," Murdoch said. He reportedly dropped $13 million of his own money into the project.
The Daily: Is It Different from a Regular News Website?
The Daily doesn't seem like anything special at first glance - most news websites offer constant updates, high-quality video and Twitter feeds. Why would people pay to receive this content on a daily basis?
However, The Daily looks much like a glossy iPad magazine - and that's its biggest selling point. The 100-plus pages of content offered daily will inform and entertain those who enjoy high-quality journalistic content but can't sit with their laptop to read it on a website. Plus, it appears the stories will be much more interactive than a typical news website. It also seems like all of the multimedia components to a story will work together better than a typical story - often, video and multimedia components of a print story seem thrown together rather than useful.
In addition, The Daily's carousel feature allows readers to easily scroll through the issue to pick and choose which stories to read. It's also delivered directly to subscribers daily, so it eliminates the need to navigate through dozens of websites to find the day's pertinent stories.
The Daily: Will It Be Successful?
Murdoch, Apple and The Daily staff are hoping that this project ushers in the new age of news consumption.
Will it work? That remains to be seen - it could be wildly successful, or it could falter like other attempts to put news content behind a pay-wall.
Another good aspect of The Daily is the emphasis on innovation. Murdoch insists that the iPad newspaper will continue to change with the times and introduce new features in the near future.
"[W] e will work passionately to continue to develop [The Daily]," Murdoch said.
