Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

The Daily Has an Angry Birds App — And the Start of a Custom Publishing Business

Hey! You like Angry Birds, right? Of course you do. So you’ll enjoy reading about Angry Birds, via a new, free iOS app about the newest iteration of the game, produced by The Daily. (An Android version is in the works.)

And if you like that idea, then you’ll love watching a promotional video for the app.

Hey! Isn’t the The Daily owned by News Corp., which also owns this Web site? Yes, yes it is. Good of you to notice, so we can deal with the disclosure here.

The Daily is also the real point of this post: The tablet newspaper is quietly getting into the custom publishing business.

Putting out other publications using the infrastructure you built to put out your own stuff is a mainstay of lots of traditional newspapers and magazines. But it wasn’t something that was in The Daily’s original business plan.

A year after launch, though, The Daily has put out several standalone apps, using the same Web app publishing system it built in-house in the fall of 2010. Most are put out using The Daily’s name and branding, like the gadget guide it published last fall.

Last month, though, The Daily helped the NFL put out a commemorative Super Bowl mag/app, and publisher Greg Clayman says more of this stuff should be coming down the line.

Right now, he says, the don’t-call-it-a-newspaper is using its existing staff to put out the new publications. Which must make News Corp. execs happy, since that means more revenue without more costs. But Clayman says he can envision building a standalone custom pub staff if this stuff takes off.

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google