After a few months of delays, Rupert Murdoch finally launched The Daily, News Corp.'s highly anticipated iPad newspaper, at the Guggenheim Museum in slushy New York on Wednesday.
Murdoch called The Daily -- which turned up on Apple's App Store at the same time as the press conference -- "a national news publication for the iPad that we have created from scratch."
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The news service will be available to the more than 10 million consumers who bought the wildly popular Apple tablets last year alone. Millions more are expected to be sold this year, even as rival manufacturers speed their own tablets to market.
The News Corp. chairman said they've spent $30 million on the launch so far -- all of which has been written off -- and that operating costs will be about “half a million a week.”
Murdoch is hoping the market reception -- unlike New York's weather -- is not icy. To entice prospective subscribers, News Corp. is offering a free, two-week trial of the publication. Otherwise, a week subscription will cost 99 cents, or $39.99 a year.
The real question for newspapers will be whether the iPad provides an enticing enough product to induce consumers to pay for content, something they so far have been reluctant to do. If so, it may represent a path to a more viable business model for news media in the age of the Internet.
Murdoch checked off advantages of producing an iPad-based publication. "No paper, no multimillion-dollar presses, no trucks," he said. "And we're passing on these savings to the reader which is why we can offer The Daily for just 14 cents a day."
Oh: It also has stunning 360-degree photos.
The Daily’s first headline? "Fallen Pharoah: Obama pushes Mubarak to quit now as a million March in Egypt revolution." The company said reporter Joshua Hersh, who carried the first Daily byline, was on the ground in Cairo. The Guggenheim demo also featured an advertiser, Pepsi Max, and the actual app had several more, including LandRover, Verizon, and Macy's.
The executives addressed one of the lingering questions: sharing. Daily readers will be able to share articles on Facebook and Twitter to non-users (read: potential subscribers). “The Daily is not an island," publisher Greg Clayman said.
Murdoch smiled at a question about whether The Daily will be more centrist to appeal to younger, tech savvy users: "The editorial position will be in the hands of the editor."
But for most publishers, the bigger news to come out of the event was from Apple, which for the first time rolled out a subscription service through its App Store. Up until now, magazine publishers with iPad versions have been forced to sell each monthly issue as a stand-alone copy.
