The Daily launches, creates first exclusive daily iPad newspaper


News Corp announced Wednesday launch of The Daily, an exclusive daily publication for the iPad. This is a significant launch, as the subscription-based app had a media event and got featured on Apple's homepage. The Daily is a free download with a subscription fee. Users can check it out for no charge during a free two-week period, after which, users will be charged $0.99 per week or $39.99 per year.

The app is basically a national newspaper in digital form. It covers wide-ranging topics of news, opinion, gossip, weather, sports and more. It also integrates video and audio, plus interactive elements such as Twitter, Facebook, and insta-polls. We noticed users can respond to items with voice comments. Furthermore, readers can share articles with friends.

It certainly seems an ambitious endeavor and is clearly thought out as an iPad product, rather than fitting existing content into the iPad. Our guess is this will appeal those who enjoy reading USA Today, but perhaps not so much who prefer more relevant and local news, or just like to aggregate their own content sources. Either way, it looks nice and seems to function well. The one exception is the Coverflow-like carousel browser is clunky, but whatever. The app has some interesting features and the pricing also seems pretty reasonable.

The Daily