News Corp Bringing National Digital Newspaper To Tablets And Phones

The debate on whether or not the printed word is dying has been going on for awhile now. It picked up quite a bit when Apple (officially) unveiled the iPad. Would tablets, especially the one from Cupertino, ruin the printed word as we know it? Would newspapers fade away into the archaic past forever? Well, the newspapers are still here, but the digital revolution is definitely far from over. And, when you have publications like The New York Times announcing that upwards of 400,000 NYT iPad editions have been downloaded, it's easy to see why anyone would want to get into the whole "digital" part of it.

That's why Rupert Murdoch's announcement that his News Corp. is going to launch a national, digital newspaper isn't surprising at all. It would obviously be a direct competitor to all of those other news publications' digital editions, but that's the whole point, isn't it? However, Murdoch believes that his version will have an immediate upper-hand, when it comes to the market, its target, and its consumption. Instead of having a bunch of long-winded stories, as we've seen for ages in those other media avenues, Murdoch believes that having more "streamlined" and "short" stories is the way to go.

Apparently, Murdoch believes that having these shorter stories will draw a younger audience in of itself, and then adding them to digital platforms like your mobile phone, or tablet (the iPad), will only make them come rushing in to read the news even faster. In droves, even. To make it better, apparently this all-digital newspaper would bring more jobs to News Corp, by adding several dozen new reporters and editors.

As far as details go about the newspaper itself, those are still rare at this point. How the distribution will work is one of the biggest question marks, though we imagine that applications would probably be the easiest way. Distributing them through the appropriate market/store/world would just be the simplest method, at least if that's how Murdoch and company want to keep their focus. Now, will we start seeing hardware specifically manufactured for this digital magazine? Anyone want to take a guess?

[via LA Times]