News Corp and Apple will launch an eagerly awaited daily news publication for the iPad on February 2, News Corp announced Thursday.
In an invitation sent to reporters, the company said that the publication, to be called The Daily, would be unveiled by CEO Rupert Murdoch and Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice-president of internet services.
News Corp has reportedly invested 30 million dollars in the initiative, which it hopes will attract millions of users to pay 99 cents a week for a news product that is specially formulated for the tablet computer format.
The Daily, which is expected to mix lively writing, sharp analysis and rich multimedia features, was originally expected to launch on January 19, but was delayed due to technical issues in coordinating its monthly subscription model with iTunes.
“I believe that it’s a game-changer altogether,” Mr. Murdoch said on a conference call with analysts last summer. “We’ll have young people reading newspapers, we’ll have different-looking types of newspapers.
It’s a real game changer in the presentation of news.” The publication will initially be available only to U.S. users of the iPad. However it is expected to expand internationally within months, and to tablet computers running Google’s Android operating system.
The newspaper industry has lost billions of dollars as readers have migrated to the internet, where most news sites are free and fail to command advertising rates that are even close to those charged by print editions.
News Corp has led the way in trying to charge readers for online content, erecting pay walls around its premium publications, The Wall Street Journal and the Times group of newspapers in the U.K. The New York Times is also preparing to introduce a pay wall around its site.
