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The Daily, News Corp's subscription iPad news publication, is about to turn one year old. To celebrate, it announced yesterday that it will be pre-installed on select Verizon Android tablets, starting with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The Galaxy Tab 7.7 will be among the next Android tablets to get the app. Existing Galaxy Tab 10.1 owners will get The Daily bundled in a software update this month.

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.

Just in time to hit the new iOS 5 Newsstand, The Guardian has launched a swanky new iPad edition. The app delivers content mirroring The Guardian's Monday through Saturday papers, but the design is all digital. Pages swing smoothly between portrait and landscape modes, the ads are interactive, and photos and videos abound.

The app is only available for iPad users running the newly released iOS 5. To promote the launch, the first 87 issues of the iPad edition are free. After that trial period, the cost of a weekly subscription is £9.99 or $13.99 per month.

Today, a mere 48 hours before Facebook's f8 Conference begins, the Wall Street Journal has launched a Facebook app called WSJ Social. According to the most credible chatter, Facebook plans to unveil a media-focused redesign at the upcoming developers' conference, which bears the slogan "Read, Watch, Listen" - a fairly obvious clue. The WSJ has decided to preempt that launch.

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 Guardian has taken a big step across the pond today with its launch of a U.S. homepage at guardiannews.com. The design is consistent with the U.K. front page, but the stories and sections are tailored to a U.S. audience. In her editorial announcing the launch, Guardian US Editor-In-Chief Janine Gibson calls it "the first tiny step in our bid to improve the Guardian website for US users," marking the beginning of the organization's new digital operations based in New York City.

Gibson goes to great lengths to downplay the importance of this launch, calling it "very, very beta," but there are some big announcements here beyond just this homepage news. The announcement also says that the Guardian is hiring a whole U.S.-based newsroom. Today's U.S. homepage launch appears to be just one step in the Guardian's transformation into a full-fledged international news organization.

• Zombie Cyborg Beetles! Implanted with electrodes at birth! Flown via radio signals! [Video] http://bit.ly/fZjB0H via @scienceblogs
• Unexpected hazards of e-book lending: http://bit.ly/dQbenZ via @maudnewton
• A Tale of Two Googles: Race, Labor, and Hierarchy in the Digital Age: http://bit.ly/eUPg93 via @ThoughtCatalog
• How blogs have changed journalism: http://reut.rs/fuugUl via @FelixSalmon
• "Putting Eric Schmidt in charge of policing online privacy is like appointing Bernie Madoff to direct the SEC" http://bit.ly/fjDLn5 via @HilliconValley

Yesterday's launch of The Daily, Rupert Murdoch's iPad-only newspaper, marked the introduction of Apple's new subscription model - a way for publishers to offer renewable subscriptions to their app-based content. And while Apple is heralding the move as a way for publishers to get more customers, some are uneasy about the company's efforts to channel all billing and delivery through its iTunes marketplace.

The concern comes, in part, as a response to news on Tuesday that Apple had rejected Sony's e-reader app as it allowed users to buy as well as read books from the Sony Reader store. That rejection caused immediate speculation (verging on panic) that this would have huge ramifications for other apps that do something similar - namely, the Amazon Kindle app, the Netflix app, the Barnes & Noble Nook app, and so on.

The launch event for Rupert Murdoch's new iPad-only newspaper The Daily was full of rhetoric about the future of journalism, heralding the app as a "this changes everything" sort of moment.

But having had a chance to download and read today's inaugural issue, it doesn't seem that the user experience matches the rhetoric. That may not be a surprise as plenty of people have long predicted The Daily would be a flop. But it still feels like a shame, considering the resources (some $30 million from Murdoch himself) that have been poured into the endeavor and considering the promise for a reinvented and reinvigorated journalism.

That's just my opinion, of course, as are these first impressions of the new app:

After much anticipation, Rupert Murdoch's latest media project, The Daily, finally held its launch event today in New York City.

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 British newspaper The Guardian launches a new iPhone app today, which the paper touts as delivering more frequent updates and broader content. But the rationale behind the new app isn't simply to provide a better user experience, but to initiate the new subscription model that this digital version of the app will provide.

The Guardian already has an iPhone app, one that will be supplanted by today's release. Since it launched in December 2009, it's been downloaded over 200,000 times, and paper says it has a "significantly high" user retention rate, with 75% of those who've downloaded it continuing to use it on a monthly basis. 25% use it every single day.

To paywall or not paywall. That has been the question that newspapers and magazines have been asking over the last few years, debating whether or not a move to charge readers to view online content would help or harm the publications' existence.

According to some early data from Journalism Online, an e-commerce system of sorts that allows newspapers to charge their regular online visitors, suggest that the paywall may not be the kiss of death to ad revenue and traffic that some had predicted.