The Daily is a daily news publication that’s only available in digital form. And I don’t mean a website. When Rupert Murdoch launched The Daily launched last year, it was billed as the first major tablet-only news source.
It was billed as the (or at least one possible) future of news. Instead of simply taking images and text from a printed paper or magazine and slapping it together in digital form, The Daily was designed with tablets in mind, complete with interactive content.
Flash forward a year and The Daily has 100,000 paid subscribers… but it’s no longer for tablets only.
Today The Daily launched for iPhone. The app is available as a free download and users can access a number of articles for free every day.
You can subscribe for full access to all articles for $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year. That’s about half the price of an iPad app subscription — which makes sense because some of the iPad elements aren’t really designed for the smaller screen on an iPhone or iPod touch.
While The Daily promises to deliver original news content, photos, and interactive charts and graphics, the iPhone version of the app has a much more basic user interface and doesn’t look all that different from any other iPhone app from a major news organization.
As The Daily continues to strive toward profitability, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the publication drop the whole mobile-only approach and launch a proper website one of these days as well. The company already delivers news through a Facebook app.
via Mashable