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今天安装了Fairfax Media集团的Sydney Morning Herald和The Age两份报纸新的iPad Apps。非常棒，比过去SMH纸质Digital Print的版本牛，强烈推荐各位新闻爱好者安装。 现在内容都全部免费（半年）直到12月，然后如果你想继续订阅的话，每个月费用是8.99刀。 Fairfax iPad app marks fresh way of getting the news Tim Dick May 31, 2011 - 9:36AM Read all about it ... Peter Fray, Simon Dulhunty, Greg Hywood, Jack Matthews and Stephen Hutcheon at the launch of the SMH iPad app. Photo: Lee Besford FAIRFAX MEDIA hopes The Sydney Morning Herald's new iPad application released today will give tablet users a new way of getting news, and help the company change the way it pays for its reporting. The app was launched at a function at the Ivy in the city last night, with a six-month free period paid for by a sponsor. From December, readers will be charged $8.99 a month. Those who subscribe to the print edition will be given a discount which is yet to be determined. The Age gets a similar app, and both are available from wherever readers want to get it, including interstate and overseas. Fairfax Media's chief executive, Greg Hywood, said the app was a core part of the company as it built a digital future around its trusted journalism. ''For the first time we have a digital experience that offers the same deep, immersive and highly engaging experience that we have had in print for two centuries,'' he said. The metropolitan digital publisher of Fairfax, Jane Huxley, said it had taken its time to build the app to ask readers what they wanted to create a "world class" app, which offered "the best of print, the best of online". Readers can share articles via social media, save them to read later and leave comments, as well as watch videos and picture galleries, and download weekly sections and magazines. It is a "live" app, with news updated during the day, while sport comes with live scores and business with stock exchange figures. Jack Matthews, the chief executive of metropolitan media at Fairfax, said the lengthy free period was partly to get as much reader reaction as possible, and allow the company to rebuild its economics of publishing "from the ground up". He said the business was going to change because "it has to change", a reference to the wider challenges in newspaper publishing where people are increasingly getting their news online, where readers do not pay and advertising revenues do not offset those lost from print. Fairfax is unlikely to follow News Corp in Britain and build a solid pay wall around its main news websites, but Mr Matthews has foreshadowed charging for some online access, or asking people for information in return for access, while keeping a lot of material free. That coming change is sparked by the arrival of the app. "It will be one of the very first times you'll see something like this anywhere in the world,'' he said. "I hope our commercial side will find a way to get excited about this, because at the end of the day we have to be able to make money as well." That was a "trickier equation", as readers would not pay to read a story if they could get it free online or in the paper. This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/ipad/fairfax-ipad-app-marks-fresh-way-of-getting-the-news-20110531-1fdj0.html |
