News Corp. Takes a New Stab at Paywalls With Buck-a-Week Daily

News Corp.'s iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, will be officially unveiled next week. Readers will pay 99 cents per day to access its content. The Daily puts an unusual twist on digital news delivery with its iPad-only rollout, and the amount it will charge is considerably less than paywall pros like The Wall Street Journal and possibly the New York Times if it enacts its own paywall...The classic newspaper may finally gets its 21st-century update. News Corp.'s (Nasdaq: NWS) iPad-exclusive newspaper, The Daily, is set to launch on Feb. 2. A weekly subscription will reportedly cost 99 US cents. Issues of The Daily will be delivered automatically throughApple (Nasdaq: AAPL) once users sign up.

News Corp. told the E-Commerce Times the company cannot offer more information before the Feb. 2 announcement.

The launch will be held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Apple CEO Steve Jobs was slated to appear, but will not because of health problems.

subscription. "I think for a paid iPad news app to succeed, it has to allow the user to buy a subscription," said Howe. "At present, that's not allowed in the iPad app store, only one-time purchases."

Choices in mobile news -- whether on a tablet or smartphone -- increase every day. "TheNew York Times already has an online iPad app, which I use quite a bit," said Howe. "It will soon become a separate product, bundled free with print subscriptions, but also available separately. My guess is that The Daily will break the subscription restriction in the App Store, and that the New York Times will then be able to exploit that new-found freedom. All that said, though, it's going to be a long, slow slog to get app-based news to approach the consumption rates of Web-based and print media."

E-readers present a new way to deliver news, and their use is on the rise. "One of the things that will help this market develop is the increasing use of e-readers," said Howe. "The more people who have e-readers, the more interested the general population will become in getting other forms of content other than books on those readers. So this market won't be stalled forever -- it's just not there yet."

Mobile Content - New Arena for News Sites

News sites are striving to find an effective balance between what people are willing to pay for and what they expect to get for free. "Digital does not mean free," Al Hilwa, program director of applications development software at IDC, told the E-Commerce Times. "While modern media has been in the process of adjusting to the digital age, the mix of paid versus free news has certainly been in flux."

Content delivery on tablets and mobiles will be a battleground for news organizations.

"It makes sense to me that there may be a tier of news and analysis that has to sit behind paywalls," said Hilwa. "The tablet form-factor opens up more opportunities for experimenting with the structure of this paywall. Content-based applications as a category is definitely one of the more exciting new things going on tablets today.