The fallout from this summer’s revelations over phone hacking by the News of the World is almost complete in terms of the Murdoch family’s stranglehold on the British media, after recently released figures relating to their new app.
Only 80,000 people have subscirbed to Murdoch’s iPad only news app ‘The Daily’ since its launch in February in the USA and September in the UK, which is apparantly only a sixth of the numbers it needs to break even.
All will remember the shocking revelations about how News of the World journalists tapped into numerous mobile phones in a bid to gather more information or uncover salacious gossip on celebrities, politicians and even people whos name had been brought into the news by tragedy, such as the families of killed soldiers and even the family of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
The revelations saw the closure of the paper and the whole story left a bitter taste in the mouths of both the British press and British people.
‘The Daily’ had a relatively quiet release, and though it has slowly picked up numbers, there is a great concern within its creators and powers at be that the application will not take off to anywhere near the heights first hoped. And although the fact that there would be very few who would expect a new publication to immediately create profit, the general disdain for the Murdoch empire seems to have become rather deep set, and unlikely to disappear overnight.
There are few that will be disappointed with these latest set of headlines regarding the infamous mogul. If the future of media and journalism is going to be in app, tablet and internet form, then the statistics show that the likes of Murdoch will not make the transition easily.
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