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 Wall Street Journal reports that publishers have been notified that by March 31, "newspaper and magazine apps that don't take payments through the iTunes store will be rejected."

Apple traditionally takes a 30% cut from developers' app sales, but it's not known what the company's share of subscription revenues would be. For its part, Apple contends that by managing the billing, it will help publishers sell more content. Indeed, many publishers have long lobbied for Apple to add the subscription feature as it will improve delivery over the current system, which until now has forced users to buy a new app for each new "issue." And as sales of digital magazines have been less than stellar, a better billing and delivery system may not be a bad thing.

That is, of course, unless you're a publisher who's built your business model on selling digital content through your own website, rather than via the iTunes store.

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:

The Daily features six categories: News, Gossip, Opinion, Arts & Life, Apps & Games, and Sports. And as those probably indicate, this makes The Daily rather light on the sort of content I look for in a daily newspaper. Today's news headlines, for example, involve Egypt, snowstorms, maximum security prisons, a doggie disco, Natalie Portman's pregnancy, and Superbowl flashbacks.

At today's launch event, The Daily boasted that it would update with breaking news, if necessary, more than just once a day. But as the content from Egypt indicates, this isn't really a source for real-time updates. There are no reports, for example, of the violence that erupted in the streets of Cairo today.

While this broad and general content may be the epitome of "mass media," it hardly seems like it will fulfill the intellectual curiosity of early adopters - early adopters of online newspapers or of iPads.

The Delivery

Content aside (a separation that really can't be made), the form of The Daily is interesting as it does try to take advantage of the iPad's multimedia experience. It incorporates not just text but full-color photographs, video, and audio. Switching your iPad from portrait to landscape takes you from the text of a story to accompanying photos - a nice touch, perhaps, if you aren't one of those people who've cursed the loss of the functionality of the auto-lock button.

You can "flip" through the stories and images and can also use a slider at the top of each page - a visual browser - to find different stories and new pages. This morning, the app's new "carousel" feature was touted as a new way to navigate and discover news. What I discovered instead: that feature seems to be the place where the newspaper's ads are displayed.

You can share many (but not all) of the stories from the app to Facebook or Twitter or via email. Recipients will receive a link to that page, which they'll be able to view even without a subscription. The articles also allow you to comment, with both the written and spoken word. The latter is an interesting if not odd feature. Perhaps the future of the letter to the editor involves angry voice recordings rather than typed missives.

There are a few irritating usability issues. When you log in to Twitter, for example, the iPad keyboard covers the "post" button. More annoying - other than the table of contents and the carousel, I found navigation through "the news" to be more difficult than serendipitous. There is no "back" button. There is no search. There are no archives.

The Recurring Subscription

It's too early to tell how well The Daily will take off, of course, and it may be a little unfair to judge a newspaper's content and form based on just the first issue. But barring any major improvements to both, I don't think I'll subscribe when my first two weeks are up (complimentary, thanks to an agreement with Verizon).

It's not that I'm opposed to subscribing to an online newspaper. I'd pay for a good iPad newspaper. But right now, that's not what The Daily offers.

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?

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.

The existing app will continue to be available, but only for the next six months when it will be shuttered.

With the introduction of a subscription fee, The Guardian's iPhone app joins the newspapers that are trying to find new ways to monetize their content for online readers. According to paidContent, The Guardian has "devalued itself on mobile to between four and 12 percent of its equivalent print subscription price." Whether or not that makes it seem like a good deal for newspaper readers, however, remains to be seen.

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.

However, those newspapers that reported little impact from a paywall were those whose restricted access was only partial. Rather than locking down and charging visitors for all content, these newspapers had instead limited the number of articles that visitors could read for free each month, making it clear to their readership that most wouldn't be affected by the paywall restrictions.

"If you set this meter conservatively which we urge people to do, it's a nonevent for 85, 90, 95 percent of the people who come to your Web site," Journalism Online's Steve Brill tells The New York Times. Most papers, says Brill, set a limit on the number of free articles somewhere between five and 20 per month, and charged a monthly subscription fee from around $3.95 to $10.95.

The findings seem to support the argument that people are willing to pay for some online content, but not all of it. But it's unlikely to end the debate on how and if newspapers - not just the major dailies like The Wall Street Journal and The Times, but smaller papers like the ones in this study - can move from free to pay (or partial pay) without losing readership and revenue.

Photo credits: State Library of New South Wales, via Flickr

Whether they acknowledge it or not, newspapers are losing out to the social networking site on the fundamental fronts of community relevance, attention and information dissemination. Yet behind the perceived threat from Facebook, there is also a new opportunity for publications to achieve newfound audience relevance.

Facebook's rise to dominance has been astounding. It is currently the most visited site in the United States, and boasts 400-plus million worldwide users. We've seen it go from a dorm room distraction to now being larger than the combined population of the United States and Mexico. With the social network claiming that roughly 70% of its user base is outside the United States, that means that there are at least 120 million Americans on Facebook today.

Taken down to the local level, though, this means that Facebook might just already have more reach in the community than any other media outlet - especially local newspapers. With the unveiling of their Web-ubiquitous "Like" button and "social bar," as well as their Graph API, Facebook is now using its strengths to redefine how we interact with the Web in its entirety.

So what does all of this mean for the publishing industry and for newspapers in particular? A few very important things:

• Facebook is now a legitimate threat to Google. It has accomplished this by changing the game from search discoverability to social context, which wasn't doable with 40 million users but is with 400-plus million users. Facebook is trying to become the first place people visit when logging into their computers every morning. The site that leads this battle carries the most online leverage, at least until it is knocked off the pedestal.
• Facebook is attempting to become pervasive across the entire Web, and without permission. Like it or not, site owners are going to have to deal with social media, but now in a much more pervasive way than ever before.
• Facebook is a competitor for the attention of local audiences. One minute spent on Facebook is a minute not spent on another Web property. Facebook will become a more interesting place as it aggregates data on what people are doing and how they are reacting to the Web as a whole, not just Facebook's network. So it isn't just necessary for media outlets to build a better Web sites anymore - they have to build engaging content that can appear on Facebook and drive value to their paper. It isn't impossible, but it has to be a priority.
• All of these things impact discoverability of a newspaper's content, who monetizes it and how. Those that succeed in becoming a viral Facebook content commodity will grow rapidly. Likewise, the decline of those news sources that fail to realize the necessary potential of Facebook will be swift. A deep and complete understanding of social media is necessary for publishers of any kind to modernize, grow and ultimately survive. It's becoming a necessary core competency, and fast.

Yesterday, The Washington Post announced their "Network News" initiative, integrating Facebook into the paper's website. The Post's incorporation of activity from users' Facebook friends immediately creates a value of social relevance that trumps efforts like the New York Times' similar, though detrimentally insular, TimesPeople network.

More importantly, however, are the possibilities such integration might provide for local newspapers. Relevance is a central theme to both the content shared on social networks and the community publication. Facebook offers those newspapers a readymade audience that is already connected to their desired local demographic. Local publications need to recognize the importance of tapping into Facebook's community, because, first and foremost, it is precisely where their readers are finding, sharing and discussing the types of pertinent content that the papers seek to champion.

Newspapers no longer need traditional Web developers. Papers now need Facebook developers, experts who can partner with creative social-savvy businesspeople who know how to take advantage of the social graph. In the wake of Facebook's new features, it will not be long before newspaper and media executives are attacking and blaming Facebook for their problems in the way they do Google today. However, those publications that more progressively pursue the opportunities and value opened to them by Facebook's new tools will have a very different reaction.

While such reminiscences undoubtedly wrench a wistful sigh from the breast of those who lived and worked in those heady days (like, before 2002), educating young would-be journalists about how early adopters and the tech-minded are consuming and helping distribute news is a necessary step to ensure the evolution rather than the extinction of American news services. Northwestern University has taken productive steps in that direction this spring and is set to present five interesting, student-created news apps this week.

The students have focused on easing creation and consumption of news while reducing costs of news production and enabling journalistic standards of research and factuality.

The body of work from this experiment includes sports story generator (Machine Generated Sports Stories, or MGSS) that writes sports coverage all by itself from box scores and play-by-play; a Microsoft Word plug-in (Easy Writer) that allows journos to research and fact-check stories as they write them without having to use a separate search engine; an iPhone app (News Feed) that provides the daily news in five- 10- and 20-minute chunks for news-hungry readers with limited time to read; and two Twitter apps.

Twitter News Service sends pertinent news links to users based on their posts. Either the tool will run in the background of Twitter or from a designated Twitter account that users choose to follow (or un-follow) as they desire.

Tweedia will combine news stories with relevant personal opinion and information on a given topic. By integrating Tweedia into a news site, readers get instant access to relevant Twitter posts. News outlets can place a Tweedia link at the end of stories that will either open a widget on the page or redirect readers to the Tweedia site.

Last year, Medill students built News Mixer, a site that mashed up local news with Facebook, allowing users to comment as they read even though many old-school news organizations still don't allow for comments.

Now all Northwestern needs to do is throw in the business school kids and a couple hundred thousand dollars; Startup Semester, anyone?

Since ProPublica announced this policy, articles from ProPublica journalists have appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and online publications, including USA Today, Politico, Salon, The Denver Post, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Los Angeles Times, ABC News, and the Albany Times Union.

To some degree, ProPublica models an approach that could eventually help newspapers to stay afloat by pooling resources and making stories available across a wider network of papers.

ProPublica and Citizen Journalism

Just this week, ProPublica also launched a new citizen journalism project, the ProPublica Reporting Network, that invites citizens to "commit acts of journalism." As its first mission, the ProPublica is asking people to "adopt" a stimulus project and monitor it. Essentially, this project crowdsources investigative journalism, and given the scope of the stimulus bill, this might just turn out to be the only effective way of monitoring the efficiency of a project of this size.

Will More Projects Follow this Path?

It would be nice if other non-profit news organizations like the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting would adopt similarly liberal licenses, though for now, we think this is a great start. If you are aware of similar projects, please let us know in the comments.

Another nice feature of the Reader application is the ability to 'browse' the paper by zooming out and seeing previews of the surrounding pages, which nicely recreates the feeling of browsing the 'real' paper.

Oddly, though, during our tests, the scroll wheel on our mouse didn't work in the application, and we had to resort to using the keyboard to flip pages.

For Free: Crossword, Front Page, Business, Magazine, and Most Emailed

If you don't subscribe to the Times or Times Reader, you can still access articles from the New York Times front page, the business section, and the most emailed articles from the Times. If you love the New York Times crossword puzzle, you will be happy to hear that an interactive version of the day's puzzle is also available for free.

For the Sunday Edition, content from the Magazine is available for free, though the Sunday Business section is hidden behind the paywall.

It is important to note that the Times already gives readers offline access to its content through its iPhone application, and a lot of the functionality of the Reader application is also duplicated in the Article Skimmer - though without offline access, of course.

The Times Reader excels in the presentation of the content, and while apps like this will surely not be enough to save the newspaper industry, we are glad to see that the Times continues to innovate and try new business models and ways to reach and retain readers.

Disclosure: The NYTimes is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.

In some respects, though, the new Kindle (which will, after all, see its debut at a college) is probably geared more towards the textbook market than the newspaper business. For textbook publishers, electronic (and DRMed) editions aren't so much about convenience for students, but about cutting out the used-book market where a lot of students get their books and where the publisher gets absolutely nothing. In 2005, the market for used textbooks in the U.S. was valued at about $1.6 billion which was about a third of the total market for educational and professional books.

As Larry Dignan points out in detail, if Amazon could sell electronic versions of these textbooks for cheaper than a college bookstore, it could cut the incentive for students to buy used books, even as it cuts out the option to sell new copies back to the bookstore at the end of the semester.

Newspaper

As for saving newspapers, hopefully, the papers that are said to be launch partners for the new Kindle, including the New York Times, will realize that they can't just recreate an electronic copy of their morning papers and hope that it will be successful. After all, the main reason why newspapers have lost their must-read status is that most of what's printed in the morning is already old news.

For a newspaper on Kindle to be successful, the Kindle version of the paper would have to be updated continuously throughout the day, just like the paper's web site. However, the fact that papers are clamoring for a larger version of Kindle so that it would be easier to replicate the feel and layout of their dead-tree editions makes it likely that the large-screen Kindle, if it turns out to be real, will see the same subscription model for newspapers where a new copy of the paper will be downloaded automatically once a day.

CC-licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user Amanda Munoz.