Murdoch's competitor on the iPad (photo: Aeternitas via Flickr)
[Ed. note: Daniel is one of Spencer Ackerman’s guest bloggers filling in at Attackerman during Spencer’s holiday. Say howdy to Daniel in comments.]
There’s a tendency among iPod or iPhone users to scoff at the notion that a news app might actually be worth paying money for. No reason to spend a few bucks on a subscription each month when you can easily go online on your phone and find the news that way. On the other side of the spectrum are people like Rupert Murdoch who think news can still be bought and sold like before the internet. Murdoch will charge for web access to the Times of London and $17.99 a month for a subscription to the iPad edition of The Wall Street Journal.
I think both these arguments are partially wrong. People are still willing to pay for content from certain news outlets but that content has to be something that you can’t get elsewhere meaning it can’t be news. Josh Marshall and the folks at TPM have the right idea in planning their app:
What we are considering is a membership or subscription plan aimed at our core readership. What it would offer would be a series of extra services and tools geared specifically to this audience. The details are still very much on the drawing board. But some potential examples include several weekly web-based live teleconferences in which members/subscribers could ask questions and discuss the news of the day with our reporters and editors. Maybe three or four of these a week, for example, each time with a different member of our editorial team — me, a member of our DC reporting team, a member of our Muckraker reporting team, etc.
Basically, Marshall recognizes that it’s no longer profitable to sell news since the marketprice for it is pretty much zero. Instead, the idea is to take advantage of TPM-addicts (like me) who would pay a few extra bucks to get a closer look at the news team. This isn’t the solution to all newspaper woes but it does create a profit where there was none before.
I think this also hints at the future of print magazines like The New Yorker. The casual New Yorker reader can get enough of it online for free but for someone like me who enjoys feeling the magazine each week, carrying it around, and flipping through the pages, there’s a profit to be had.
Back to iPad apps. If the Journal were to offer something on the iPad app that you couldn’t get anywhere else —online, in print etc.— then it might be a good idea but as it is now, there’s nothing stopping someone from getting an iPad and just using its web browser to get everything the app has to offer.
