Tag Archives: the Daily

Bloomberg: News Corp’s The Daily averaging 120,000 readers a week

Bloomberg reported late on Wednesday (28 September) that News Corporation’s iPad-only newspaper the Daily has been averaging around 120,000 readers a week, said to be “less than a quarter of the number the company said it needs to make money”.

The figures came from advertising executive working with the publication.

News Corp., whose Chief Executive Officer Rupert Murdoch personally introduced the publication about eight months ago, may have even fewer paying subscribers since people can read the Daily free for two weeks. The 120,000 figure is for so-called unique weekly visitors, which includes people who pay and those who don’t, said John Nitti, executive vice president of Publicis Groupe SA (PUB)’s media-buying division Zenith Optimedia.

Bloomberg adds that Murdoch had said in February the publication, which was launched in February, would need 500,000 subscribers “to break even”.

Read the Bloomberg report here.

Nieman: New data on the Daily suggests social media decline

Joshua Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab has been analysing the success – or as he believes the decline – of Rupert Murdoch’s iPad only US newspaper, the Daily, by monitoring tweets sent directly from the app.

This post is interesting, not only as an insight into possible problems at the Daily, but for some of the techniques and tools Benton uses for his analysis.

No one outside News Corp. and Apple has a reliable way of knowing how often people read the Daily. But there is one way in which the Daily’s app interacts with the public web — through Twitter sharing. On nearly every page in the app, there’s a sharing button in the top right that allows the reader to share a link to the story on Twitter or other social networks. (A few pages, like the table of contents and user-customized pages, aren’t sharable.)

Benton has used PostRank, a Canadian social media indexing service that analyses how individual web pages are shared through social media.

It’s easy to think of a tweet as just 140 characters, but there’s a lot of metadata around that little snippet of text: when it was tweeted, who tweeted it, how many followers she has, what date she joined Twitter, and more. Amidst all that data is information about where each tweet was generated. Did it come from Twitter’s web interface, or from the official Twitter BlackBerry app, or a third-party app like Echofon or TweetDeck? That’s in there.

And thanks to Twitter’s requirement that app developers register with its API to allow in-app tweeting, that means you can track every time someone tweets from within the Daily.

The data doesn’t look good for the Daily. Its activity on Twitter seems to match my own perceptions of how they’re doing — an early rush of excitement; a decline as people lost interest and the app struggled with technical problems; a plateau once the tech got sorted out; and then another decline once the app started charging users.

Nieman Lab’s full post is at this link.

MediaGuardian: The Daily to launch in the UK within months

The Media Guardian reports that News Corporation’s iPad newspaper the Daily will be available in the UK within months, following comments by News Corporation’s chief digital officer Jon Miller at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit.

The arrival of the Daily in the UK will depend on when Apple’s new online subscription model becomes available in this country, the report adds.

The chief digital officer of Murdoch’s News Corporation, Jon Miller, told the Abu Dhabi Media Summit that the Daily would be available in western Europe “not too long from now”. When asked if that would be in the first half of this year, he answered yes.

Full story on Media Guardian at this link.

Fonts in Use: A detailed look at the Daily’s typography

Designer and typographer Stephen Coles has taken a comprehensive look at the fonts used in Murdoch’s new iPad newspaper, The Daily.

“It does have the look of a fairly serious weekly news magazine,” he writes. “Much of this posture comes from steering clear of ultra-modern or casual typefaces.

“My guess is that the style guide is still being written, staff are still getting comfortable with the format, and everyone is still learning what’s possible in this new medium.”

News Corporation ‘working around the clock’ to fix Daily bug

News Corporation has said it is “working around the clock” to fix a technical problem in its new “iPad newspaper”, the Daily, that has prompted hundreds of complaints and negative ratings from users.

Readers have left comments on the Apple’s US app store to complain of frequent crashes, load problems and other stability issues when the Daily attempts to fetch a new update of the newspaper.

Since its high-profile launch in the US last week, the product has attracted more than 3,600 reviews on the Apple online store.

While about a third of people gave the app the full five stars, the next most common rating was one out of five, with almost 1,000 people giving it the lowest score possible.

One reviewer wrote: “Is this the future of news? The app crashed the first time I ran it. After rebooting and restarting it hung while downloading the current edition.”

Another person adds: “Very slow loading, better fix it within two weeks or we are gone.”

In a blog post on the official website, the Daily’s tech developers wrote: “We’re working around the clock to improve the stability and functionality of The Daily.

“We’ve had massive uptake since Wednesday’s launch, and with that kind of audience scale in such a short period of time, we’ve seen some stability issues and bugs that need to be addressed.

“We’re working as quickly as we can to find these problems and fix them. The beauty of the application ecosystem is that we can constantly iterate on and improve our product, and we’re aiming to put out an update within the coming weeks.

“We are addressing the technical issues that we’ve seen and we want you, our readers, to know that this is a major priority for us.”

News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch says the Daily will “push the boundaries of reporting”, offering news, features, photography, audio, video, and graphics for 99 cents a week or $39.99 for an annual subscription.

TechCrunch: All eyes on the Daily, but watch out for News.me

Last year we wrote about a personalised tablet news service being developed by Betaworks, the technology development company behind online services such as Tweetdeck and Bit.ly, and the New York Times.

TechCrunch’s Erick Schoenfield has been playing with an early version of the new app, called News.me, and has a preview up on the site.

Schoenfield is billing News.me as the NYT’s answer to the Daily, but it seems much more like social aggregation apps such as Flipboard, using Twitter and URL-shortener Bit.ly to pull in content.

When you first launch News.me, you see the welcome screen below with a few tutorial hints: Tap on the people along the top dock to see what stories are appearing in their Twitter streams, tap on a story headline or excerpt to read it full screen, or you can stretch a story open inside the stream with a reverse-pinch. This reverse-pinch is one of my favorite parts of the experience. You flick to scroll through the stream, and when you find something you like, you can open it up and read it without loading a new page.

Full post on TechCrunch at this link.

paidContent: News Corp’s ‘iPad paper’ the Daily to launch on 2 Feb

According to paidContent, News Corporation’s new iPad publication, the Daily, will be launched on 2 Feb, a little later than previously rumoured.

An invitation sent out yesterday by News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch revealed that the Daily will be launched at the Guggenheim museum in New York.

Steve Jobs, now on medical leave, was to appear with Murdoch at the launch. Instead, iTunes guru Eddy Cue will represent Apple. One thing hasn’t changed: as James Murdoch affirmed earlier this week, subscriptions to the News Corp iPad ‘paper’ will run 99 cents weekly.

The Cutline: Steve Jobs to join Murdoch on stage for unveiling of new iPad publication

According to Yahoo blog the Cutline, Rupert Murdoch will be joined on stage by Apple chief executive Steve Jobs later this month for the launch of News Corp’s new iPad publication, the Daily.

Known as The Daily, Murdoch’s iPad publication has been the talk of the media world over the past couple months, and the News Corp. chief has even dubbed it his “No. 1 most exciting project.” The hush-hush project has been taking shape at the company’s Manhattan headquarters, but it will also have staffers in Los Angeles.

But while news of the editorial hires has steadily leaked out, The Daily’s brass have remained tight-lipped about the launch.

The Cutline’s full report can be found here.

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Guardian: Murdoch and Jobs teaming up for iPad newspaper

Guardian: Murdoch and Jobs teaming up for iPad newspaper

The Guardian reports that Murdoch’s News Corporation is thought to be working with Apple to launch its new iPad newspaper, called ‘the Daily’, later this month.

According to the report, the newspaper will combine “a tabloid sensibility with a broadsheet intelligence” and that there is no print or web edition planned.

According to the US elite fashion industry journal Women’s Wear Daily, the Murdoch-Jobs “newspaper” will be run from the 26th floor of the News Corp offices in New York, where 100 journalist have been hired, including Pete Picton, an online editor from the Sun, as one of three managing editors. The editor of the Daily has not been announced, but observers are assuming it will be Jesse Angelo, the managing editor of the New York Post and rising star in the News Corp firmament.