By Nick Evershed
FAIRFAX Media is to launch iPhone apps for its masthead news sites within six months – and it will charge readers. iPhone apps for The Age, Brisbane Times, Sydney Morning Herald and WA Today websites are in development, according to Darren Burden, Director of News and Platforms at Fairfax Digital.
No decision has been made on the charge for each app. The new apps would go beyond a normal web browsing experience, he promised. Fairfax has only recently upgraded the design and layout of mobile versions of its websites.
“The key benefit of the app over a mobile site is that an application can use the native part of the phone, and you can use parts like the address,” he said.
This means you can email a story on the mobile to a friend, or you could save an advertiser’s telephone number to your address book. “You can also really control the look and feel of the service, whereas if you're building an optimised iPhone site you're sort of dictated by the browser.”
Mr Burden said another benefit of the app format was the ability to market the news sites and Fairfax Media through Apple’s app store, which exposes the company’s journalism to a wider audience. The app store also makes it easier to charge.
Mr Burden said Fairfax would charge readers for the new apps though they were “currently looking at around four ways of doing it”. “You can go for the straight up one-off payment, you can do the subscription-based service, you can do a software upgrade type model, there are all kinds of benefits. We're modeling all the different kinds,” he said.
Fairfax is also building similar news apps for Android based smart phones, such as Google’s Nexus 1. Mr Burden said Fairfax had looked at software that demonstrated how apps appeared on the iPad, Apple’s new tablet, but have no plans to release anything on the new platform.
“Mobile is going to be a big deal,” Mr Burden said.
“For the last five years, every year someone says it’s going to be a big deal, but definitely the iPhone has created a market, and people are interested in it, and people are browsing and reading content on their phones because it’s comfortable. It’s fantastic.”
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