The rise of the tablet
How are you reading this? Sitting in the office, in front of your desk, on a huge computer screen? Or all snuggled up in a blanket on the sofa, with a slim tablet computer in your hand? If it is the latter, and if you are an Apple-addict, you may have recently come across a new item in the Appstore: The Daily.
The latest publication from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is the first digital newspaper designed exclusively for the iPad.
“New times demand new journalism”, states the tagline on The Daily’s website – but do we really live in a new time? And is The Daily really a new kind of journalism? Let’s have a look.
Examining The Daily
The Daily is delivered on your iPad every day – although so far only in the US. The front cover looks very much like any other e-paper, but once you open an issue, things start to be a little bit different.
On the top of the screen, you have six buttons labelled with the sections of the newspaper: News, Gossip, Opinion, Arts & Life, Apps & Games and Sports. By pressing on these buttons, your jump directly to the first page of your chosen category.
The articles do not only contain “static” material like text, pictures and videos, but also tweets from the person an article is about or live sports statistics on your favourite football team. So, although the paper is delivered only once, the information you get with it is – at least partly – always up-to-date.
If you want to flip through the whole issue, you can use a feature called the “Carousel”, in which you see all the single pages of the issue lined up next to each other. This makes your flipping-experience more of a scrolling experience, which still emanates the feel of a newspaper or magazine, rather than a website.
The app also tells you which articles you have already read, and which you haven’t gone through so far, so you don’t miss a thing. You can also press a shuffle button and get a random article to read. The Daily offers the opportunity to share some (but not all) articles with your friends by posting them on Facebook or sending them via e-mail.
So is The Daily a new kind of journalism?
The combination of all these features in one publication exclusively made for a tablet computer is indeed new, but does it really justify the term “new journalism”?
Most of the functions – like the sharing and the regular updates – you can also find on almost every other newspaper website. And, while you can access the websites of most newspapers for free, you have to pay 99 cents (about 60p) per week to read The Daily.
Murdoch continues to follow his strategy of putting up pay-walls by using this pricing model. Since July 2010, everyone who wants to read the news from The Times and The Sunday Times websites has had to pay for the content. The Wall Street Journal has also employed this tactic in order to generate income from a previously free medium.
The Daily does not use any new ways of storytelling – combinations of videos, texts, audio pieces and pictures can be found on every good news website. The only “new” thing about The Daily is therefore its distribution – laid out and designed as a newspaper, but accessible only online and on the iPad.
The Daily as “new journalism”? Probably not. But then why did the publication’s launch get so much media coverage?
The answer is simple – it is a publication designed for a tablet; the next big thing in computers – at least if you believe the enthusiastic computer experts.
Will tablets really revolutionise our use of computers? Louise Ogden and Ann-Kathrin Lindemann debate about the pros and cons of tablet computers.
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