I took Rupert up on his two week free drive of his iPad tabloid, The Daily, and won’t be subscribing when the trail expires. If you thought USA Today was the “McPaper,” then The Daily is proof we live in an idiocracy. Other than the novelty of propping it up on the counter as I eat my breakfast, and the occasional order to “turn” the tablet to read or experience something, it’s just loud yellow journalism headlines, snack sized information bitelets, and a sad harbinger of things to come. Thank god there is quality out there, for free.
All this while the GOP tries to strip federal funding out of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Sure, there are bigger issues to argue over in the budget, but gutting one of the few strong sources of public news shouldn’t be one of them. I guess I have to thank Rupert Murdoch and his drive to brick his stuff up behind the paywall, it induces me to finally give some money to PBS and NPR to keep the good stuff like the News Hour, coming my way. I’m still pissed that the Cape Cod Times whacked me for the dickheaded privilege to click on 50 stories per month.
Too bad. I was hoping Mr. Murdoch would have at least established a ‘magazine’ model we could follow on our iPads and the ‘will be here aplenty for Christmast’ Android tablet market.
Still, other news organizations struggle with the paywall question.
Do they use it for niche subpubs, such as one for rabid sports fans of a particular college?
Do they ship content over two weeks old off to Acquire or some other archiving service?
Or do they continue to slam with ads and coupons?
For me, I don’t mind the ventures into the unknown as much as it is still all shaking out.
They had a great opportunity to change the way we get our news. Instead they only sought to change the way we stick dollars in their wallet.
I’m now thinking that an aggregation of the best rss feeds (via my Google Reader) I’ve got into Flipbooks is the way I’ll be getting my news for the next year.
I agree — FlipBooks, the New York Times, NPR and Google News are doing just fine for me.
I agree. The Daily sucks! Such a terrible excuse for a newspaper. The New York Times is about to go behind a paywall too. Watch it fail.