At a conference in London today, David Shing, AOL's "digital prophet" (actually his title), expressed a strong view on the superiority of websites over app-based products, saying, "Apps are a rubbish concept."
Perhaps he should've run that line by someone at headquarters before trotting it out. As you read this, top editors at the Huffington Post Media Group are moving forward with plans for a new digital magazine called Huffington, created expressly for the iPad and other tablets. Like The Daily, News Corp.'s tablet newspaper, Huffington will take the form of an app rather than a mobile-optimized website, a Huffington Post spokesman confirms.
(Actually, to be completely accurate, the working name being used for the prototype is "Huffington." The period is part of the logo, as it is with Conde Nast's Lucky. But since no one calls the latter "Lucky.", I'm going to assume the same will eventually happen with "Huffington." Let's hope so, anyway.)
Overseeing the project is Tim O'Brien, the Huffington Post's executive editor. O'Brien was hired away from The New York Times in 2010 to oversee Huffpo's original journalism efforts.
Huffington will be published weekly and will reflect the Huffington Post's mix of original journalism and aggregated news, possibly with a small number of stories commissioned specifically for the magazine. Whether it will be a free or paid product hasn't yet been determined. It will be free to readers, a Huffpo spokesman says, though a source says a paid model was considered as well.
The Daily has shown that there's a market for paid news apps; since its launch in early 2011, it has consistently been one of the top-grossing apps in the Apple store. Whether readers would be willing to pay for a publication that's mostly reheated content from a free website is a different matter, however. And then there's the issue of charging for stories whose writers in many cases weren't paid.
AOL, which owns the Huffington Post, already has a tablet-based magazine-like news product. Called Editions, it's a news reader that pulls in content from a user's social network. ("The Magazine That Reads You" is its Yakov Smirnoff-esque tagline.)
But while similar products like Flipboard, Pulse and Zite have caught on in a big way, Editions hasn't. Among free news apps in the iTunes store, it's currently No. 60. (That category is a bit of a misnomer, since it includes apps that are free to download but require a paid subscription for full access.) Meanwhile, Flipboard, Yahoo Livestand, Pulse and Zite are No. 3, 5, 14 and 26, respectively. No wonder David Shing thinks apps are rubbish.
