I downloaded Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily over the weekend, it’s the first daily newspaper designed for the iPad. It has plenty of bells and whistles, animated transitions, embedded videos, and plenty of content to go with it. They sure put the iPad’s processing power to the test. But it didn’t totally grab me. It felt a little too overdone. I appreciate their effort, the carousel of featured articles is clever but jittery, the embedded social integration is game changing when compared to present content iPad apps. But is that enough?

To me it screams as though the newspaper world is trying too hard to make things “fresh,” “edgy” and well, just different. Murdoch laid down $56M for The Daily to operate in year 1, the main problem I see is that it’s a once a day thing, and the way information moves on the internet today is in realtime. If you’re not up to date with the latest information you’re not meeting the readers needs. I see this plenty here on Mobile Magazine. We try to give our readers the most timely and thoughtful articles that we believe are the most interesting to them, and that happens many times a day, not just once.

The app is free to download with a 2 week trial, it is worth checking out.

Here is the official commercial for The Daily which Murdoch aired on the Super Bowl yesterday.

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Remember that News Corporation was founded by Rupert Murdoch and it’s the same vehicle that drives the rhetoric at Fox News, the much aligned network that is oftentimes the brunt of the jokes on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Far be it for me to call myself a political pundit, but there you go.

In any case, it sounds like Apple VP of Internet Services Eddy Cue will be on hand for an event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York for the announcement. After all, Steve Jobs is still at home, slurping down some chicken noodle soup and trying to feel better. (The world misses your “one more thing” and black turtlenecks already!) Word on the web calls for iTunes-fueled subscription billing at 99 cents a week.

What do you think? Do you still pay for the news or are you perfectly satisfied with reading the overflowing onslaught of material freely available on the web?

[Giz via J.W. Peters]

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The Daily may be exclusive to the iPad, which would be strange since similar tablet (and smartphone) devices could be capable of accessing the content. Steve Jobs has reportedly come to some type of deal with Murdoch to create this digital “newspaper.” The kicker is that there will not be a print version. At all. It’s digital only. Does this spell the end of Newsprint?

In Rupert’s mind, every member of the family will have a tablet of some kind in the not-too-distant future, thanks to economies of scale and lowered price points. He also recognizes that readers will be spending more time on their tablets than ever before.

This is so much more than just a rumor too. News Corp has been putting together a newsroom of about 100 staffers for about the last three months. According to reports, the Daily will have its beta launch around Christmas and will cost less than five bucks a month. That’s way cheaper than, say, the New York Times… and it’s going to be published seven days a week.

Considering that more people (myself included) have come to digest our news for free online, this low-cost alternative to the dead tree newspaper could prove to be an interesting experiment for Murdoch and News Corp. [WWD]

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