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?

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?

Facebook: Just a Directory

With regards to Facebook, we can't help but think that Murdoch must be willfully oblivious to the fact that the service's users are abandoning the company in favor of Facebook. Just a simple look at the current traffic stats for both services tells a very clear story about the abysmal state MySpace is finding itself in today. While Facebook is growing rapidly, MySpace's traffic is, at best, staying flat. And to think of Facebook as nothing more than a directory just ignores the reality of how users are using the site and what Facebook's management team envisions the service to be.

Maybe before Facebook turned into the platform it is today, that statement could have held true, but today, to imply that users on Facebook don't go to the service to find others with common interests is simply wrong.

Micro-payments: Not a Solution

We have to agree with Murdoch, though, that micro-payments are probably not a viable solution for monetizing news content on the web -- though we would argue that some people have managed to make a living off the Internet from doing things other than just monetizing search.

So far, users have also resisted subscription models for online newspapers. The only exception here is the Wall Street Journal, which is really a special case, and only time will tell if readers are willing to buy online subscriptions to their favorite papers.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons