John Smith's Blog

Oh look, The Guardian have changed the headline and subhead on the story I linked to in my previous post. It's now:

Rupert Murdoch creates 'iNewspaper' - with the help of Steve Jobs News Corp reportedly set to launch iPad news publication exclusively via download

Rupert Murdoch, head of the media giant News Corp, and Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, are preparing to unveil a new digital "newspaper" called the Daily at the end of this month, according to reports in the US media.

Whilst the article history does acknowledge a change has been made, it doesn't actually give any hint as to what the change was, it could just as easily have been some trivial typo fix.

Unfortunately for them though, their use of semantic URLs means that there's still visible evidence of their original intent - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/nov/21/ipad-newspaper-steve-jobs-rupert-murdoch is a bit of a stretch from the new headline.

BTW, I'm not claiming this change was down in any way to my writings - having seen how many hits I (don't) get, I'm not under any illusions about the readership of this blog :-(

The Guardian/Observer have just put up an article that at first glance makes one of my recent posts look pretty stupid.

Whereas I was disparaging newspaper execs belief that the iPad would be their saviour, according the Graun/Observer's headline:

iPad 'newspaper' created by Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch
Apple and News Corp reportedly set to launch joint iPad news publication exclusively via download

From that, and the following article, you might well think that Apple is as involved in this as News Corp.

However, if you go and dig out the original article - which is the sole attributed source for the Graun/Obs piece - you'll note that:

• Steve Jobs isn't mentioned until the very final paragraph
• Whilst it does say that Jobs and KRM have been in discussions, it shouldn't be any real surprise that two corporate moguls talk every now and again - and bear in mind that the Murdochs seem to be frequent guests aboard Larry Ellison's navy, yet I don't recall seeing any stories about Oracle and News Corp being close business partners
• There's no mention of Apple having any involvement, any more than any of the thousands of other apps on the App Store

which gives a rather different impression.

The Daily project certainly exists, and it may well be that Steve Jobs has some sort of presence at its launch, but there's no evidence of any real Apple involvement at this point in time. I also have to wonder how strategic this project is - with a quoted headcount of just a hundred people, and more of an emphasis on light news and features than "serious" journalism, it seems more akin to the late UK freesheet TheLondonpaper than any of News Corp printed titles.