Murdoch sinks $30 million into tablet newspaper

ABOVE: A video tour of the all-electronic newspaper.

News Corp today launched its so-called "iPad" newspaper, The Daily, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (a venue chosen least anyone miss the subtext Daily is a relatively high-brow publication, including staff poached from The New Yorker – though with some tabloid recruits mixed in to spice it up).

Apple takes a slice
Ordinarily, a subscription to The Daily will cost $US0.99, or $US39.99 a year. News Corp will keep 70% of subscription revenue, with Apple keeping the balance

But for the first two weeks, starting today, it's free, thanks to a deal with US phone company Verizon (which has just signed on as Apple's second official carrier in the US).

The Daily is only available to people in the US, by dint of a geographic restriction on iTunes credit card sign-ups.

Rocky launch
A curious mob decided to take advantage of the free period all tried to download The Daily.

One reviewer had problems accessing it initially, and was met with some blank pages, another said it “crashed like crazy”.

A thousand tech sites and bloggers have weighed in on The Daily's usability and looks. But, curiously, there's been nary a whisper about the quality (or not, who knows?) of its editorial.

One iPad developer, who is based in New Zealand but familiar with the project, told NBR that "I played with it [The Daily] a couple of weeks ago, it was really laggy and crashy then.The shipping version today is far less laggy, and I've yet to have this public version crash on me. It definitely needed another couple of weeks of optimisation."

Don't like an ad? Just swat it away
But apart performance issues aside, critics seemed enamoured by The Daily's lush use of multimedia, which includes video, 360-degree photos, and a swipe-to-turn-the-page interface.

Sometimes when you swipe, the screen goes blank for a few seconds, indicating that an ad is loading - but if you don't want to see it, you can (surprisingly to some), just swipe on through to the next page.

Readers can forward story links to each other but - to the chagrin of many - they cannot cut-and-paste.

$US30 million investment
Visually, The Daily seems a stunner - though so it should be given that Rupert Murdoch (79) told Fox Business News that the tablet paper cost $US30 million "to get to this point" and, with its 100 reporters and various bells and whistles, will cost $US500,000 a week to run (so far Apple has sold around 7.3 million iPads).

The developer familiar with the project told NBR that the investment included a "coding jam" that saw Mr Murdoch fly around 400 software developers from all around the world for a two-month brainstorming session in New York. 

Ironically, it's News Corp's boomer result in its "old media" TV and film operations that's helping to fund the new media push.

Take that, Steve
Mr Murdoch told Fox that The Daily would remain exclusive to Apple's iPad tablet for a year.

After that, it will expand to support other platforms such as tablets running Google's Android software (which, in the smartphone world, is now more popular than iPhone).

That's a clever move.

Another smart play: News Corp manged to break Apple's former prohibition on publishers selling annual subscriptions through iTunes (formerly, only single copy sales were allowed for most).

More, Mr Murdoch told Fox that he wants News Corp's current 70% share to go "up".

The question now, is whether smaller publishers could follow suit.

Will they have the power to muscle Apple into allowing the annual subscriptions?

And, faced with Rupert's mega spend-up, and premium production values, will they try to follow suit?

Or will they just decide that they're regular website looks just fine on a tablet (especially given Google Android tablets' support for a wide variety of formats, including Adobe Flash, infamously blocked from iPad).