Introducing The Daily

The Daily -- a collaboration between Steve Jobs' company and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. -- will cost $0.99 per week, or at a small discount for $40 per year, and is promising to include over 100 pages of original news in each issue.

The daily newspaper for the iPad will be billed automatically, to customers iTunes accounts, on a weekly or annual basis. In terms of features, the newspaper features traditional text-based stories, video and interactive content -- and much was made of the 360-degree photos that'll let photojournalism go far beyond what's possible in a printed context. Embracing the social media phenomenon, you'll be able to share stories on Twitter, Facebook and via email, and the mechanism seems very Apple-esque -- you simply click to clip, save and press send to share the content you've chosen. This is a boon for some, who'd wondered if News Corp. would pull its habitual "linking is the enemy of news" stunt--and represents something of a reversal in attitude. Stories within The Daily will also link out to the Web, so it's not a completely closed ecosystem. However, the openness of the app is limited--though the presenters were wary about answering questions about "discoverability" it seems like you'll be able to share content with other readers of the Daily, and non-readers too--but the non-readers won't get any of the app's interactivity and there's nowhere on the Web they can link to it. This is almost in line with the comment that "hundreds of billions of people sharing content on the web, and we want to be a part of it." In terms of real-time "serious" journalism, the paper is hitting the ground running--and has a reporter, Josh Hearst, in place in Egypt to report on ongoing events there.