News Corp. Readies The Daily for iPad
NEW YORK (
) --
News Corp.
(NWS)
is prepping a tablet newspaper application on the grand hope that the
Apple
(AAPL)
iPad is the future path for news delivery and payments.
With a 100-member staff and a $30 million budget, according to
The New York Times'
media columnist David Carr, News Corp. will soon be launching
The Daily
. The electronic newspaper is expected to be assembled in the evening and sent to subscribers' iPads in the mornings, similar to conventional newspapering.
The Daily will initially include a temporary Web site for access to non-subscribers, according to Carr's column Monday.
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News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch, whose company runs
The Wall Street Journal
and the
New York Post
, has been working on an
for more than a year, targeting e-readers.
Murdoch is eager to stop the erosion of news revenue as so-called aggregators such as
Yahoo!
(YHOO)
and
(GOOG)
collect and index stories free online. Through an Apple iPad application, Murdoch is likely to have better control over the content distribution and therefore the payment collection.
Last year, in an interview with
TheStreet's
Dan Freed, Murdoch was
how the final payment process would work.
"We're still thinking our way through this, and there will be micropayments as part of it," Murdoch said at the time. "But I'm thinking much more along the lines of subscriptions like
The Wall Street Journal
does."
The upshot: While the payment system seems quite forward looking, the yesterday's-news-today delivery approach appears to lack the type of immediacy that online readers have come to expect.
--Written by Scott Moritz in New York.>To contact this writer, click here: Scott Moritz, or email: scott.moritz@thestreet.com.To follow Scott on Twitter, go to http://twitter.com/MoritzDispatch.>To send a tip, email: tips@thestreet.com.
