Josh Sternberg of digitday.com reminds us that NewsCorp’s news app, The Daily, celebrates its first birthday this week, and after one year it’s not just viable but a growing commercial success in an Internet environment hostile to the publication’s business model: subscription.  Yet it has a quarter of a million monthly readers and 100,000 paid subscribers.

Though (full disclosure) my son is a reporter for The Daily, my enthusiasm for the app is completely independent.  I just happen to think it’s terrific. But don’t take my word for it – it’s the iPad’s third most popular app.

Though The Daily started out as a dedicated iPad application, it is now accessible on Android, but the eye-popping graphics play best on the iPad’s big bright touchcreen. Some fairly heavy-hitting advertisers like Verizon, IBM and BMW display their wares there.

“I think it is the future of print,” digitday quotes a media executive, an odd description since there isn’t a single drop of printer’s ink associated with the publication.  But that’s just the point: it delivers all the news, culture and entertainment of a printed newspaper or magazine, but the videos, popups, callouts and other dazzling graphics are exactly what the iPad was created for. If you don’t have one, borrow it, download a two-week free subscription and see for yourself.

By the way, I have dubbed The Daily a “zapp” – drawn from “news app” the way “blog” is derived from “web log”. I believe this term may be original with me and if it achieves wide circulation and enters the English language (Oxford English Dictionary are you listening?) I hope Rupert Murdoch will reward me liberally, or at least recognize me with an asterisked footnote in one of his, um, papers.

The Daily After One Year: Some Lessons Learned

Richard Curtis

The Daily, NewsCorp’s  tablet-dedicated news app, does not possess a single atom of organic matter. Yet we call it a newspaper. A news paper. Why?

Reporter Joshua Brustein explains that this is an example of a skeuomorph, a “superfluous reference to the past.”

He reminds us that we not only use skeuomorphs (“from the Greek words for tool and form”) every day but vitally depend on them to navigate our brave new digital world

Another example is the analog custom of designating consecutive page numbers in e-books when it is more appropriate, digitally speaking, to fix your position in the document with a percentage of your progress. “E-books, by definition, do not have pages,” writes Brustein. “Depending on which size font someone uses, she may have to advance the screen many times before ‘turning a page.’ Then there are the questions of how to approach books with many physical editions, or texts that exist only in digital space.”

Want more? Brustein cites artificial sounds as more important psychologically than practically. Digital cameras make a satisfying click that hearkens back to the sound of a mechanical camera but is completely artificial, especially in view of shutter-lag that produces an image several critical moments earlier than the soul-satisfying but otherwise useless sound of a shutter being activated.

Read about some other self-deceiving skeuomorphs in Why Innovation Doffs an Old Hat.

By the way, I have dubbed The Daily a “zapp” – drawn from “news app” the way “blog” is derived from “web log”.  I believe this term may be original with me and if it achieves wide circulation and enters the English language (Oxford English Dictionary are you listening?) I hope Rupert Murdoch will reward me liberally, or at least recognize me with an asterisked footnote in one of his, um, papers.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Trailing sparks of intense controversy since the day it was announced, The Daily goes live today. The Daily is the news app created exclusively for the iPad by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

The only thing not in doubt is Murdoch’s determination to make the venture work: word on the street is that he’s invested $30 million in it. He told Fox Business that The Daily was his “No. 1 most exciting project.” James Murdoch, who does not always see eye to eye with his old man, described it as “our flagship project.”

In addition to breathtaking techno-innovation the money went into the best journalistic talent money can buy, like New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, TV producer Steve Alperin, and Richard Johnson, Mister Page Six himself.

What has stirred so much debate? For one thing, restricting the news app to one dedicated device flies in the face of the shibboleth that information wants to be free.”News Corp.’s expectations for the The Daily seem pegged to the hope that convenience, novelty, and that old Apple chic will convince users to go against the now-established assumption that online news and feature content, which is so widely available for free, is not worth paying for,” comments Christopher Cocca in Huffington Post.

Cocca also cites another issue that seems counterintuitive: the publication’s subscription model and a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall. “Why part with a dollar a day for The Daily‘s curation of the news and other media that you and your friends on Facebook and Twitter are already curating for free? You already pay for your internet connection, your data plan, your cable. Will The Daily be such a useful digest of everything you’re interested in to be worth the extra 30 bucks a month?” A dollar a day? Murdoch has publicly stated it will be a dollar a week – $0.99 to be precise ($39.99 for a one-year subscription).

Interestingly, one aspect that is definitely not controversial will be the political slant: there isn’t going to be any.  Despite the rightist bias of Murdoch’s holdings like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post,from all we can reckon he’s going to leave his heavy right fist off this operation.

The launch event was held in New York’s Guggenheim Museum attended by Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of Internet services. Originally it was to be held on the left coast with Steve Jobs presiding, but his health prohibited his attendance. Too bad; he might have answered a lot of questions and extinguish some of the fires of controversy that The Daily has kindled.

For information visit thedaily.com and check out the coolissimo video below.

Richard Curtis

Cliff Guren and Pam Turner, executives of Skiff, the recently developed e-book platform, have just announced the company’s acquisition by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

In a review of e-book readers last January we cited Dan Nosowitz, Gizmodo’s reviewer, who gave Skiff high marks for beauty, slimness, weight, screen size and functionality: “I just got a chance to play with the big-screened, touchscreened Skiff Reader, which is targeted at periodicals. It’s incredibly thin, incredibly light, and they’ve even got a color screen prototype—Kindle and Nook should be scared.”

Kindle and Nook may not have been scared then but perhaps they will be now. Rupert Murdoch has given numerous hints that he wants to develop his own e-book reader(See Press Baron Murdoch Ready to Get E-Ink on His Fingers?)  and now he has one off the shelf.

Here’s the notification emailed by Guren to publishing partners.
******************************

Dear Skiff Publishing Partner,

I’m writing to share with you that Skiff’s publishing platform has been acquired by News Corp. As News Corp. announced yesterday, this acquisition is part of News Corp.’s commitment to premium digital journalism and to developing new ways for publishers to monetize their content online and via a wide range of devices.

We are pleased that News Corp. has recognized the value of Skiff’s accomplishments and we attribute that in part to the fine partners that have worked with us to this point.

In connection with this sale, Skiff, LLC will be winding down its current operations. We fully expect News Corp. may want to consider opportunities to renew the relationship we’ve had with you at Skiff. In the meantime, we appreciate your continued discretion under the confidentiality agreement that we have in place.

While some members of the Skiff team will be joining this effort, Pam Turner and I will be heading off to pursue other opportunities. As a result, I wanted to let you know that Lee Shirani (lshirani@skiff.com) will be following up with you.

Pam and I deeply value your support. We consider ourselves privileged to part of the publishing community. Thank you… We look forward to working with you again.

My personal contact information going forward is as follows [Deleted]:
Regards,

Cliff Guren and Pam Turner

Cliff Guren
Vice President, Content Acquisition

The Wall Street Journal, that bastion of capitalist journalism, has concluded that the Information Wants To Be Free movement is tantamount to the end of civilization, and the paper will begin charging micropayments for articles and subscriptions, according to Financial Times‘s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and Kenneth Li. Robert Thomson, WSJ’s managing editor, says the “sophisticated” scheme will be launched in the fall.

“The move will position the Journal as the first big newspaper title to adopt a model many are studying cautiously as they seek to reduce dependence on plunging advertising revenues,” say the Financial Times reporters. You can read about it in WSJ plans micro-fees for online articles.

What makes the Journal’s proposal sophisticated? For the answer we turn to a recently created venture called Journalism Online, whose tenets are being studied by a number of newspapers in the hope of finding a solution to the drying up of ad revenue watering holes and the defection of subscribers to online news sources. Here are the essential talking points from Journalism Online’s press release:

• First, Journalism Online will develop a password-protected website with one easy-to-use account through which consumers will be able to purchase annual or monthly subscriptions, day passes, and single articles from multiple publishers.
• Second, Journalism Online will aggressively market all-inclusive annual or monthly subscriptions for those consumers who want to pay one fee to access all of the JOI-member publishers’ content. Revenues will be shared among publishers.
• Third, a key initiative of Journalism Online will be to negotiate wholesale licensing and royalty fees with intermediaries such as search engines and other websites that currently base much of their business models on referrals of readers to the original content on newspaper, magazine and online news websites.
• Fourth, Journalism Online will provide reports to member publishers on which strategies and tactics are achieving the best results in building circulation revenue while maintaining the traffic necessary to support advertising revenue.

Bloggers – pay particular attention to point #3, because it puts you on notice that you may not be able to quote, or even access, content without paying a toll. As a fair user of such content I have some serious concerns about this restriction. And, as a crusty cynic, I am quite skeptical that a news publication’s content can be so airtightly controlled. The effort to restrict it might have the ironic upshot of forcing bloggers to become pirates. Even those of us who agree that information wants to be paid for may, out of self-defense, become Informationwantstobefreeites.

Click here to read the venture’s press release detailing its business model and operational format.

The Journal‘s micropay innovation may be only the first step to a shift to an all-digital news delivery format instituted by Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp of which WSJ is a component. We recently conjectured about Murdoch’s keen interest in ordering an e-reader to carry News Corp’s papers and magazines, or developing one of his own.

Richard Curtis

Now that press baron Rupert Murdoch is officially courting digital technology, we can expect to see a lot more attention paid to e-books in Murdoch-owned media. A good example is Steven Johnson’s How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write, published in the Wall Street Journal. Though the piece has a slightly Johnny-come-lately feeling to it, expressing gee-whizzes that tech and media bloggers have been gee-whizzing for decades. Johnson makes some very significant points and even a few memorable bon mots. Alluding to Kindle’s portability, he says, “The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go.” And this:

Think of [the reading experience] as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity — a direct exchange between author and reader — to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.

One truly cogent passage was not so much conjecture about the future as commentary on something that is happening today – the kindlification of “that most finite of 21st-century resources: attention.”

Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article — sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.

This echoes observations we made in an essay entitled Watching Books : “Thanks to television, the Internet, video games and computers, we have come to expect color, interactivity, instant gratification and a complete immersion of the senses from our screens…The fundamental appeal of books is their ability to transport us to the author’s world. The best books immerse us so deeply in that world that we become almost immune to distraction. But screens are breeders of distraction from the sort of commitment to thinking, reflecting, and imagining that books demand.”

Johnson goes on to speculate not just about how books will be read but how they will be written. For all those Johnny-come-latelies who haven’t been plugged into the revolutionary paradigm of digital publishing for the last decade, the Wall Street Journal‘s piece is well worth your time.

RC