News Corp. to Launch Digital Newspaper
posted Sunday Aug 15, 2010 by Nicholas DiMeo
Let's face it. The newspaper is slowly following the path of the eight-track player, Betamax and HD-DVD. Teens now have the attention span of a goldfish and the demand for instantaneous satisfaction with as little work as possible. Young adults in their twenties have their blog sites and video podcasts. People in their thirties have CNN and Fox. The only people reading a newspaper with their morning coffee - with the finance section neatly folded and laid on top by their loving spouse - are the older generation. The same older generation who is afraid of the Internet and those new redtooth headsets and Scandisk flash drives (misspelled on purpose). Right? Maybe not so much anymore.
With The New York Times claiming to have reached 400,000 downloads of its iPad edition of its newspaper, it's becoming more and more clear that the digital world and the Internet are things that the news companies are going to want to be a part of in the next few years. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. seems to agree. Plus, if newspapers go away, that's one more step to being green, yes?
More on what Murdoch and Co. are wanting to do after the break.
Murdoch announced this week that his News Corp. plans on releasing a national, digital newspaper designed specifically for mobile devices and tablet-PCs. He doesn't look to have this one just be another digital paper, however. Murdoch believes that his version will have an immediate upper-hand, when it comes to the market, its target, and its consumption. Instead of having a bunch of long-winded stories, as we've seen for ages in those other media avenues, Murdoch believes that having more "streamlined" and "short" stories is the way to go.
The next generation reading the newspaper doesn't exist right now. It looks like Murdoch is going to change that digitally. The shorter, more concise stories will definitely attract the younger generation and will also attract people like me, who read hundreds of articles a day, looking for that one article that is interesting. Murdoch also said that the all-digital edition would be adding dozens of editors, writers and other staff to the company. Hooray job creation!
We don't have many details, though. No word on distribution or supported platforms at this time, but the idea is sound. Just launch it in the application stores and watch the numbers hopefully skyrocket. The only next step is to see if some manufacturer will make hardware designed just for this online paper.
