Remember Fairfax’s iPad app for the SMH and Age? And how it was essentially just a PDF of the paper that cost $18 a month and was universally panned by reviewers on iTunes? Well, the newspaper giant is trying again. Second time’s a charm, right?
The new apps for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, both of which launch tomorrow, will cost $8.99 a month when they start charging for them in December. Until then, the content will be sponsored. Even once the sponsorship period ends, you can expect to see magazine-style ads throughout the publication, which is neither a direct translation of the newspaper or the Fairfax websites.
Fairfax has developed the new app in-house, so it will be interesting to see just how worthy it is of a $9 monthly subscription. Anyone keen?
Bryan Steel
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 11:21 AMIf it is anything like The Age iPhone app it is going to suck balls. so slow to load. i don’t think i would even take it if it was free.
Tom
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 11:23 AMI’ll try it out since it’ll be free at launch. I doubt I’ll use it that much as I can get the content easily on theage.com.au. The only thing that would prompt me to start paying with it would be if the quality of journalism increased (somewhere along the lines of how The Guardian do their stuff). But with the subeditor debacle, I doubt that will happen.
Sean
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 11:43 AMSure I’ll try it for free…. Then decide… Their last application was crap, even worse than the ad laden “The Australian”
Andrew
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 11:47 AMWhy would anyone want to read the rubbish from Fairfax? Even if it’s free?
Most of their stories are off the wire services. The ones that aren’t are almost exclusively written by university educated inner city green voters, who think ‘costs of living pressure’ is when their skim soy latte price goes up.
Big Windows
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 12:12 PMBolt… I presume?
jc
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 12:19 PM;)
JM
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 12:53 PMActually I was a little irritated when I found my local cafe was charging $3.80 for a small cappuccino.
Nads
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 1:16 PMI prefer the Herald Sun which as unbiased pieces such as “Carbon Tax will be worse the Herpes”…
♣TadMod♣
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 1:17 PMI laughed SO hard at that!
Rob
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 12:07 PMThe type of Gen Y folks who read Gizmodo need to realise that a newspaper costs a lot more money than a little blog which, itself, syndicates a lot of content from overseas sources. $9 for a month’s worth of content, from a proper, large news source, is actually good value, compared to buying a physical newspaper everyday. But hey, go ahead and don’t buy it, and watch newspapers go out of business. Then, once you’ve stopped singing and dancing about, “How online killed newspapers,” you might stop and lament the death of proper, large media organisations.
Big Windows
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 12:24 PMAgree Rob, however, I think you have to go back to the most shadowy player in all of this… Google… Google convinced newspapers to put their stuff online, for free, promising a solid revenue stream from adds, then leveraged this freedom to get Gen Y involved (news is free to them). Where has the revenue gone… I’ll bet that newspapers cant tell you and I’ll bet that no single person in Google can tell you either… Ask the ATO they have even less of a clue. Now that the idea of journalism as a camera and a blogg has caught on quality is lower than ever and journalists just cant get paid. The only ones that do seem to be overly sensational gossip columnists… Have a good look at the hangers on that write about the AFL now. Have you heard a disparaging word from that lot about the style of and quality of games in the recent past… Nope They know what side their bread is buttered on… They dont have a choice tow the party line or work on an Alaskan oil pipe for the rest of your life… Don’t blame Gen Y… You can only go with what you know… Blame the ones pulling the strings… Not the puppets.
TG
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 2:26 PMum, most newspapers had free websites before Google even existed.
eg, smh.com.au launched in 1995 but Larry and Sergey only met for the first time at Stanford that year; Google didn’t become an actual company until 1998
Non-newspaper online classified players (seek.com.au, realestate.com.au, and craiglist in the states) have had far more to do with disrupting the newspaper business model than Google in my opinion.
StevoTheDevo
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 4:03 PM+1 to this
Classifieds were the newspaper gravy train!
Selling dead tree was just the medium by which Newspaper companies could get the classifieds to people and they were too slow off the mark to capitalise on their brand recognition online.
George
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 12:29 PMI don’t have a problem with spending $8-$10 per month on a newspaper app – however I expect it to carry detailed news, opinion pieces and editorials – not just the couple paras that come across the newswires. I am looking at value-added content – some commentary, analysis, expert review etc. that sets the newsaper app apart from the myriad free news consolidators on the web.
JM
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 12:59 PMI know a few young journalists who get published reasonably frequently in the major papers and you know how much they get per story. NOTHING. All in the hope of one day building a portfolio that will allow them to quit their real job and get an actual paid job in journalism. The internet has killed print media and books are going that way as well. It is something we have to come to terms with as an unstoppable change, no different to the introduction of robots in manufacturing.
chrisp
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 7:37 PM… and, regrettably, the only “real paid jobs” in journalism remaining will be as a shill for a large corporation or as a spin doctor for some scumbag politician.
bri_cheese
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 12:51 PMI’ll have to see if it includes the comics and the cryptic crossword. Then decide.
J
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 1:17 PMIve seen it and used it, it currently beats anything else out there in this space. It plays to the strengths of the device, has great content from across a broad range of fairfax publications and offers a compelling companion to other news sources, inc print and online.
Yes it will have ads, but they arent as annoying as free news sites.. And are inline with what u see in the print world today anyways. Anyone tried to flick through a copy of wired magazine lately?
Give it a go and im sure u will be satisfied :-)
Wok
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 1:44 PMsmh.com.au is free though… duh.
Jono
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 1:59 PMFrom the article:
That “substitution” had implications for how Fairfax raised revenue.
“You can’t charge for something on an iPad and give it away free on a desktop. And you can’t charge for something in a newspaper and give it away free on a tablet,” he said.
Translation: Paywall on smh.com.au
Rob
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 4:37 PMsmh.com.au isn’t the full paper, however. A lot of the longer (and frankly, more interesting and cerebral) stuff gets left out of online. Whereas this iPad version has everything. I guess a lot of Gen Y wouldn’t realise that, having never regularly read a newspaper — or perhaps even having an interest in the more interesting and cerebral style of stories. If it’s not about a cat who can count or a viral video of a man being attacked by ducks, they don’t care much.
Jono
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 1:55 PMWow, all that AND it magically increases your iPad’s screen size? SCORE!
Nads
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 3:34 PMIt’s not bad! and $9 a months is more then reasonable, seeing as I will probably look at it daily.
The first Fairfax iphone app was shitty this one is noice!
Phil Campbell
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 6:30 PMHey, be fair. I think The Age was actually pretty good on the ipad. In fact, if it wasn’t for the lock-in subscriptions, I would happily buy a copy every few days. I liked that it had everything that was in the paper version – yep, including the comics and the crossword and, most importantly, the 9-letter word puzzle. The pdf-y thing worked well; click for a faster text version of each article was efficient. Personally, I don’t want to pay for a stripped back version of the news.
Kevn
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 11:34 PMWill be interested to compare this to the PDF version, which I’ve been using for some time. If, like The Australian, the heart is cut out of the paper…no sale.
Jacob
Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at 10:22 AMBeing a Sydney resident, it’ll at least be good to be able to access The Age from up here (yes, I’m a big fat leftie).