Information wants to be free, reporters want to be paid, Part 40

What’s been hinted at for months and implied for years, appears to be nearer reality.

In what became a brief in today’s business section, AP breathlessly and tritely reported, “Stop the presses — completely. The world's first iPad newspaper, The Daily, is prepping for launch.”

Sources told AP the formal announcement will come in San Francisco Jan. 19 at “an event” — I guess they couldn’t call it a press conference — to be attended by Rupert Murdoch, the 79-year-old CEO of News Corp., and Steve Jobs, chief executive of iPad-maker Apple.

The Daily is expected to be delivered via app to only electronic tablets. It is unknown what the subscription price will be, but News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal charges $3.99 a week for an iPad subscription, the AP story says. There was not even speculation as to whether The Daily would be U.S.- or world-oriented or even in what languages it might appear. Murdoch has vast press, television and entertainment holdings in his native Australia, Britain and the U.S.

Murdoch hinted of things to come in a speech in 2005 before the American Association of Newspaper Editors — since ominously renamed the American Association of News Editors.

I quoted him in a subsequent column as saying, “Scarcely a day goes by without some claim that new technologies are fast writing newsprint's obituary. I come to this discussion not as an expert with all the answers, but as someone searching for answers to an emerging medium that is not my native language. Like many of you in this room, I'm a digital immigrant. I wasn't weaned on the Web, nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives. They'll never know a world without ubiquitous broadband Internet access."

What that digital frontier will look like is evolving. It is expected to be a blend of text, photos, video, interactive graphics, posted as the news occurs, along with whatever next can be used to profitably jack into our cerebellums.

That AP story says, “Newspaper publishers view the iPad and other tablets as a golden opportunity because they can sell ads and subscriptions at higher prices than they have been able to get on websites, though those rates are still lower than for print.” No presses, no delivery trucks.

But reporters still insist on being paid.

Below you’ll find a video of Murdoch from seven months ago talking digital on his Fox Business channel. This is followed by a news account from a month ago speculating on the debut of The Daily: