Verizon users get a free trial for one week. A monthly subscription costs $3.99, and an annual subscription costs $39.99. Publisher Greg Clayman told paidContent that The Daily currently has 100,000 paid subscribers on the iPad. It needs 500,000 to break even.

News Corp has put its weight behind The Daily. It hired a large, accomplished team, and chairman/CEO Rupert Murdoch reportedly invested $30 million personally. Murdoch says The Daily's costs are about "half a million dollars a week."

Though paid subscriptions have grown about 25% since it last reported numbers in October, that's a steep hill to climb. Staci Kramer at paidContent wrote in October that "[t]he shelf life of other News Corp. digital experiments suggests the Daily isn't likely to survive... unless it shows real signs it can get in the black."

David Brinker, The Daily's senior VP of business development and operations, wondered aloud to The Wrap yesterday whether it should have launched on February 2 of this year instead. Was The Daily ahead of its time? Brinker gave his publication a wide berth, saying the market could take three years to develop.

Meanwhile, since the launch of Apple's iOS 5 and Newsstand feature, The Daily has some competition for its vision of the future of newspapers. Expanding to Android devices gives The Daily a chance to diversify. Android tablets have begun to chip away at the iPad's dominance, occupying about 20% of the market.

News Corp has had some issues with digital media lately. After Murdoch joined Twitter, the company verified an impostor account pretending to be his wife.

How do you read your digital news?

The app presents a grid of WSJ stories, though some of the slots are occupied by ads. In the left sidebar, users can subscribe to "editors" - who can be WSJ staff or other Facebook members using the app - to customize the story feed. Currently, the stories can be viewed in full for free from within the app. The New York Observer's Anna Sanders - who was cool enough to be invited to the WSJ Social launch party - reports that the app will go behind a paywall after the first month, despite the fact that it is (heavily) ad-supported.

The feature set actually makes for a compelling social news app. It puts WSJ staff and everyday users on the same level, and users curate the curators in addition to liking and sharing stories. The format of the story grid and the articles works well on a tablet.

It's not what I would call a terrible interface, but it is a Facebook app. It does have a fixed frame of Facebook ads alongside it that periodically refreshes its wares. It also displays threaded Facebook comments on the right side of the article window, taking up almost half the frame. It's a distracting presentation, but at least the comments are relevant.

One troubling feature, common to many Facebook apps, is that WSJ Social demands that you turn off secure browsing before you continue. Upon your next login to Facebook, your secure connection is restored.

Can Paywalled Content Be Social?

The obvious question raised by WSJ Social is whether the "social" moniker can honestly apply to a paywalled app. Sure, when the paywall goes up, Wall Street Journal subscribers will be able to share stories with each other, but they won't be able to share with anyone else. The New York Times paywall allows anyone in through links shared on social networks, but that's not how the WSJ works (Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a syndication partner of the New York Times).

It's worth noting that Facebook announced an upcoming program for select news partners called Facebook Editions in July. It hasn't yet launched, but the reports in July suggested a September timeframe. The WSJ is conspicuously absent from the partners who were named. The Daily, another News Corp. publication, is on the list. Alisa Bowen, general manager of the WSJ Digital Network, told Forbes that this app was developed independently of the Facebook Editions projects. "This is totally a Wall Street Journal initiative," she says.

What do you think? Would you subscribe?

News Corp bought the one-time social media titan in 2005 for $580 million and it has been bleeding money for several years. The move by News Corp to accept bids is akin to a sports franchise that tries to trade an underperforming player to get some nominal value before it has to just cut its losses and release him from the team.

Myspace has tried to recreate itself as a gaming, music and entertainment platform. It launched an email platform in July, 2009 that caught some traction but not enough to stop the hemorrhaging. The slow death of Myspace is akin to the transformation that has happened at AOL where the one-time giant service provider has turned into a content platform. Yet, where AOL has been buoyed by legacy money from its service provider days, News Corp has no such source of income from Myspace to fall back on.

Twitter passed Myspace in September 2010 as the third most trafficked "social media" site on the Web, according to comScore (even if Twitter is not exactly "social media"). It was said to be working on some "big stealth projects" last August but there has been no real news on what that could be since. Myspace was said to be looking for developers with "killer Ruby on Rails skills and experience with MySQL, NoSQL, Linux, Apache." The platform did launch Myspace.com/Everything, a hub for celebrity news and gossip, in the meantime. Yet, if that is the major innovation happening at Myspace these days it is no wonder that News Corp finally wants to rid itself of the burden.

Originally scheduled for January 19, the event was delayed due to the announcement that Steve Jobs was taking a medical leave of absence. The participation from the Apple CEO was important as The Daily is pegged as an iPad-only newspaper, and the new product demonstrates both the "future of the newspaper" as envisioned by Murdoch's News Corp and "the future of subscriptions" as envisioned by Apple.

Rupert Murdoch unveiled The Daily today with a speech full of promise, arguing that new times call for new journalism. Murdoch argued that "the iPad demands we completely reimagine our craft."

The Daily: Price and Content

The Daily issues will be available to subscribers for 99 cents a week via iTunes, as part of a new subscription service that will give those users instant access to new issues - that is, your new issue arrives on your iPad "doorstep" without your having to connect to iTunes to update.

The Daily will contain over 100 pages of stories that cover the gamut of news, life, opinion, entertainment, sports, and the obligatory crossword puzzle. The content will blend text, video, and audio, with a small selection of the stories read aloud. While the content will update daily, there will be the opportunity for the service to update with breaking news as well.

Contrary to some of the early rumors about The Daily, the new publication is "not an island." You'll be able to share the stories - via Twitter, Facebook and email. But content won't just be pushed out to the Web. The Dailiy will pull it in as well, with certain Twitter feeds providing content.

The Future of Newspapers or a Refresh of a "Legacy Brand"

Murdoch argued this morning that changes to online media demanded more than something a "legacy brand" could provide. To that end, News Corp has thrown a substantial amount of resources at the project, including a reported $30 million investment from Murdoch himself.

Some of those resources will go to pay for staff. In preparation for this new endeavor, The Daily has built a specific team, hiring some 100 journalists - some well-known names and some newcomers - who will write its original content.

Murdoch says the company's cost are about "half a million dollars a week." And with a subscription cost of 99 cents a week, you can do some preliminary math there to see the subscriber benchmark The Daily may be aiming for.

At 99 cents a week, The Daily will likely find a lot of new subscribers today. But it remains to be seen if its journalism and its user experience will keep readers coming back.

The app is set to become available in the iTunes store at 12 noon EST today. We'll be giving it a test-drive. Will you?

Fox Launches Mobile Hulu-esque Subscription Service

Fox Interactive Media, which ranks 9th on comScore's top 10 based on total videos served, announced today that it is taking a stab at mobile video subscription service with what it calls Bitbop. Is it an iPhone app? No. An Android app? No. A mobile website? No. It's an application for the BlackBerry.

BitBop, available on the BlackBerry Bold, Curve and Tour models, is a free application that allows users to watch many of the same TV shows and movies they know from Hulu directly on their phones. While the app is free to download, it comes with a subscription fee - $9.99 a month - to access content. Family Guy, The Office, 30 Rock, Glee, CSI, Friday Night Lights - all the major players are present and accounted for.

If you're asking yourself why the service is only available on the Blackberry - and why wouldn't you - it's because Fox has inked an exclusive deal with BlackBerry makers RIM (Research In Motion). It's a curious partnership, since the majority of BlackBerry owners use their devices mainly for work and enterprise functionality - not exactly the kind of people who are more like to watch online video on their mobile device, if you asked me.

Still, it will be interesting to see how it plays out and if Fox can boost their low video market share numbers. There is certainly a market for on-demand mobile video - the success of Netflix's iPad app and the anticipation of its iPhone app can speak to that thread. Whether that market is on BlackBerry devices is yet to be seen, but this partnership could bode well for both parties.

In an interview today with Australian media outlet Sky News, Murdoch hinted that when News Corp sites start charging users for access to content around June 2010, said content will be de-indexed from all search engines. It's an old-school approach to the burgeoning threat of new media, but who wants to argue with a 78 year-old billionaire? And exactly how much share does News Corp hold in the search engine news v. old-guard media battle?

Murdoch continues to criticize Google as plagiarists who steal News Corp content, just as he claims users should never have had access to free content in the first place. Take a look at this video of the interview. Beware: It's long and deeply fascinating:

The most fascinating thing about the interview is that Murdoch points out the sticking points of traffic valuation and monetization that only a 4-billionaire has the right to comment on. Does inclusion in Google News results guarantee clickthroughs? Do clickthroughs guarantee loyal readership? Does loyal readership in any way convert to ad dollars?

Taking it a step further, when one considers the absolutely abysmal rates of conversion of clickthrough users on advertisers' websites, does the funnel of Google News traffic generate revenue from consumers to advertises and thence to publishers?

Or is it all a rhubarb goulash, as Murdoch would have it?

Clearly, there are subtleties to the case, which carries with it every complexity ever pondered by those who attempt to provide value to users - most of whom indignantly refuse to pay for content and accept pirated content as a substitute - and those who guard the economic and cultural longevity of traditional media, many outlets of which continue to provide the most valuable and insightful commentary in a news environment that revolves around instant deadlines, fast-beats-best reportage, and shoddy fact-checking.

But as much as the newsprint-and-ink old guarders among us can appreciate Murdoch's last stand, one appreciates - as a user and as a technologist - the cooperation and innovation of companies such as the New York Times, the BBC, and other very traditional news outlets that have seen the value of distribution, aggregation, and mass information.

If, however, News Corp decides to deny Google bots access to its content, Google news will likely suffer little. Between the Associated Press, Reuters, and other print and broadcast news services, one wonders how much the absence of News Corp listings - primarily represented by the Wall Street Journal and FOX - will affect Google News.

At the same time, Murdoch also dismissed Amazon's Kindle, because he doesn't want News Corp to cede its content rights "to the fine people who created the Kindle." During a Senate hearing about the future of the newspaper industry yesterday, the CEO of the Dallas Morning News announced that Amazon will take a 70% cut of the newspaper subscription revenues from the Kindle. Those numbers do, indeed, seem rather outrageous, though some might argue that the 30% the newspapers will get from Amazon is still more than the zero dollars they are getting from people who read the paper without the Kindle.

Interestingly, though, while Murdoch heralded the return of paid online newspaper subscription, News Corp also proudly announced that the Wall Street Journal's free iPhone application has been downloaded over 360,000 times. And that app, on a device fully controlled by Apple, gives users all of the WSJ content for free without the need for a subscription.

Senate Hearing

Yesterday's Senate hearing on the "Future of Journalism" made it clear that there are quite a few newspaper companies who would like to go back to charging for their content (while lobbying for tax breaks at the same time). Google's Marissa Mayer and Arianna Huffington managed to put some of the newspapers' hyperbole into some much needed context (Huffington's testimony starts at around 58min here). They argued that while the age of the printed newspaper may be coming to an end, journalism itself will blossom in the future, and that online publishers can indeed make money from their online content by smartly monetizing their traffic (and those who don't want their traffic to come from Google can just add a line to their robots.txt file anyway).

It's Not About the Future of Newspapers - It's about Journalism

We also think that it is important to move away from the question of how we can save the newspapers (easy answer: we can't). Instead, the more interesting question is how we can save good, in-depth, investigative journalism. There are clearly no easy answers for how to save the newspapers and still be able to finance good journalism, and we have doubts that charging for online access is a viable model. Users have clearly voted against this, and even if a paper wanted to charge, users could just head to another paper that decided to go with an advertising-based revenue model.