I've had a couple of hours playing around with "The Daily" iPad app since it was launched and I have to report it's not going to rock the world.
The design is slick and it's packed with multimedia, but it's juddery and, at times, slow. Not that slow, but slow enough to keep reminding you that there's lots of technology between you and the next page.
I'm sure it will improve with updates, but it's disappointing after the amount of money and number of people that have been thrown at it by News Corp. Its budget is $500,000 a week. And it's annoying it's only available in the US, with no time-scale to roll out in other areas on what is, after all, a universal platform.
I subscribed for a short time to The Sunday Times iPad app - yes, another News Corp paper - and "The Daily" doesn't seem that different. I know the iPad is less than a year old, but "The Daily" doesn't really stand out from all the other glossy multi-media mags and rags already in the App Store.
Rupert Murdoch says there's no specific demographic for "The Daily". As he puts it, it's aimed at everyone. And the first edition anyway seems to take a straight-down-the-middle judgement on news coverage. The lead story was Egypt, with lots of background features, but there was also plenty of showbiz, personality and sport news in there as well. There's also no obvious political bias, but News Corp has never been slow in introducing one if it wants to.
We'll also have to wait to see how it deals with a big breaking story. Its editor says it can react quickly and push out updated pages. It certainly won't work if you have to download the entire edition again. It took me six minutes to download the first edition on a WiFi connection. I hate to even imagine how long it would take on 3G. It seems odd that the old concept of pressing a button to publish a paper once a day should be carried over to the iPad with its potential for constantly flowing updated news. But then, old hacks die hard.
It's pitched at a good price - 99c a week easily outdoes printed papers. But let's not forget there are some newspapers that are free on the iPad. They may carry more ads and might not be as multimedia, but they don't cost you any cash, let alone fiddling about with in-app subscription forms.
At the launch, Rupert Murdoch said: "New times demand new journalism". It seems to me what he's launched is standard old journalism on new technology. And that's about as far as it goes.
You can follow IJSMblog on Twitter and Facebook
Comments