Media

Murdoch’s Daily FINALLY Coming to UK

Chuck Ansbacher | Wednesday 16 March, 2011 13:59

What are you reading this on right now? Your computer at work? Phone in bed? Laptop or tablet at a coffee shop? Did you come from an RSS feed? Twitter? Facebook? Did a friend send you a link? Or, like most of our readers, did you make a wrong turn while searching for boob pics.

With the majority of the public now getting their news from internet sources, the point is that you are receiving the news in a very different way than you did even five years ago. You aren’t reading it in a traditional cover-to-cover magazine or tabloid format, and also, you aren’t paying for it.

As you’re probably well aware, Rupert Murdoch has placed a fairly sizeable bet on your willingness to change this new habit. With his iPad only The Daily launching just over a month ago, Murdoch is hoping to put news back into a non-free, non-flexible format. You can only read it in one place (on your iPad) and in order to do so, you have to pay for it. The future? Or a really dumb attempt to turn the clocks back.

Whichever way you feel about Murdoch’s news gamble, pretty soon you’ll have a chance to make a judgement for yourself. That’s right — The Daily is coming to the UK!

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.

The Daily will be available via iTunes, although the exact timing of the launch is uncertain as several British publishers have expressed unhappiness with Apple’s plan to charge them 30% of their subscription fees for all iPad apps it sells via its digital store.

There were also suggestions from one company source that News Corp will also create a UK-specific version of the Daily at an unspecified future date – but others at the media giant emphasised there were no immediate plans for a British edition of the title.

I’m not against paying for things. I pay for my internet connection, I still subscribe to magazines, and if I had an iPad, I might consider paying for a high quality daily news publication on it. The problem with The Daily is not that it’s behind a pay wall — it’s that it is a piss poor paper.

If you haven’t read editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo’s memo to his staff regarding Egypt, and how it is “over” (well before Egypt was anywhere close to being “over”) now is a good time to do so. The Daily wants to drive the news, but doesn’t want to cater to modern news consuming habits. It’s been a month since Angelo rallied his troops to “get in front of a story and make it ours,” and it hasn’t happened.

Maybe that’s because they were too busy trying to find “the oldest dog in America, or the richest man in South Dakota.” Because that’s the kind of news people will pay to read.

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