Murdoch tries an old fashioned approach

The pace of iPad App releases by newspaper and magazine publishers has ratcheted-up of late with most major publications now boasting a product in the App Store or at least one at a mature stage of development.

While that may give hundreds of mastheads an iPad presence, I don’t think many have thoughtfully embraced the new platform at all well. For an industry that desperately needs a circuit-breaker — something that adds value to the online reader experience and thereby to balance-sheets as well — none so far would appear to have game changer potential.

But good news is trickling out of the 26th floor of News Corporation’s Manhattan headquarters where it is said that the patriarch of print, Rupert Murdoch, has a staff of one hundred with an investment of $US30 million together with a detachment of engineers from Apple putting the finishing touches on a digital newspaper called “The Daily” and to be made available only on the iPad (and Android etc., later).

Unique to the industry, Murdoch has established a brand new newsroom to supply his mobile platform at a time when his competitors are looking to the iPad to plug into their existing ones. And if Jobs’ people are as deeply involved as is rumoured, we’re bound to see an App that is best-in-show and that will form the template for many more.

Murdoch is ticking the same two boxes that lead to Apple’s back-from-the-brink success of the last decade: content and design.

Unlike publishers who are trying to sell content through iOS apps that can still be found for free on their websites, Murdoch’s business model is invoking the age old advantage of exclusivity. The Daily’s stories won’t be available anywhere else: if you want them, you’ll just have to buy the App.

That good newspaper and magazine design has a positive commercial impact is backed by science. A page of tightly arranged text keeps writers happy but is read by less others than one nicely balanced with white space and “entry points” along the way. A clean and minimalist aesthetic is inviting whether it’s on a printed page or a streetscape. While newspaper designers are fully aware of all this, design is something that Apple built its entire brand around. So if Jobs is taking care of development of The Daily App we can expect a marque-product, one that redefines the genre and that others will emulate.

The Daily is a pilot exercise for all those publishers who are at this moment letting Murdoch take the first step into paywall-territory, ready to follow him if he succeeds. Likewise, if publishing exclusive iPad content proves a short to medium-term boon to readership, I think you’ll see publishers’ ten-year plans condensed the world-over, with a move to exclusive journalism for the mobile platform that is no longer fed via the web for free.

In any event you’ve got to commend Murdoch for investing seriously at a point the industry acknowledges is a defining one for its future. If he can pull it off, Murdoch will have won many friends amongst his enemies.