But the fact that News Corp. is putting so many resources into this project raises a basic question that has yet to be answered satisfactorily: What should an iPad newspaper look like?
Well, I am not sure it should look like a newspaper at all. The nice thing about starting from scratch is that the Daily won’t have to feel familiar in the same way that an iPad app for the Wall Street Journal or New York Times does. I fear that even the Daily will be too parochial, showing only news and content produced by its staff. But people no longer limit their news consumption to one publication, even within a single reading session.
From a reader’s perspective, the optimal iPad newspaper should be three things:
- Social: It should show you what your friends and the people you trust are reading and passing around, both within that publication and elsewhere on the Web.
- Realtime:News breaks every second, and publications need to be as realtime as possible to keep up. A “daily” already sounds too slow.
- Local:The device knows where you are and should serve up news and information accordingly, including, weather, local news and reviews.
In other words, it should look a lot more like Flipboard or Pulse, integrating news from people’s Twitter and Facebook feeds. I will be surprised if the Dailyfollows any of these three tenets. The purpose the iPad-only publication seems to be to isolate readers in the iPad so they have to pay for it. But even if that is the case, it won’t succeed unless it embraces the rest of the Web.
I asked some TechCrunch readers on Twitter what they think an iPAd newspaper should look like. Here are their answers (add yours in comments):
Brennan Stehling
about 3 hours ago via webRetweet
Devise Innovations
about 3 hours ago via webRetweet
Angelo Italiano
about 3 hours ago via webRetweet
Craig Kroeger
about 3 hours ago via webRetweet
Anthony Frasier
about 3 hours ago via webRetweet
0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 4 4
Authors: Erick Schonfeld