All eyes on Rupert Murdoch and Apple for the launch of the first iPad daily

The TOC for The Daily's "news" section

After a 45-minute presentation, The Daily was set to go live on the Apple App Store at 12:00 p.m. EST. Here's the link. There's a video tour here. The press were treated with pre-loaded (loaner) iPads in the lobby. A quick hands on:

Paging through The Daily took about 10 minutes. The general impression is more magazine than newspaper, with the kind of clever headlines, captioned photos and fitted boxes that are hard enough to do well on a weekly magazine and will be tough to produce on a daily's deadline. The bells and whistles -- that interactive tour through all the SuperBowl games in history, for example -- will require a separate staff and are likely to be on-offs.

The issue was about 100 pages long, which they say will be typical. The flow was broken up every few pages with a full-page ad. The navigation was tricky; there's a table of contents for the "news" section, but not for "gossip," "opinion," "art & life," "apps & games" (!) and "sports." The fastest way to find out what's in an issue turns out to be the carousel button on the top right, which gives you the album view Apple introduced on iTunes.

The good news for skeptics who predicted that Murdoch was creating a walled-garden product, totally cut off from the Internet, is that the The Daily will be making HTML pages (without bells and whistles) available on the Web, where they will be shareable and linkable. Maybe it won't be, as some predicted, DOA.

UPDATE: After 45 minutes reading The Daily on the subway ride home, we're not sure about that DOA thing. The lead stories -- the Cairo protests and winter snowstorm -- read like pieces dashed off by one-man bureaus and can't compete with, say, the New York Times, memeorandum or the Weather Channel. There are plenty of cheesecake celebrity photos, but they're not going to turn the heads of kids raised on Internet porn. The only bite I could find in the copy was at the end of Richard (Page Six) Johnson's gossip section, which treats readers to blind items like this one:

"Which hard-partying, hot mess of a premium cable actress recently learned she is pregnant? No one knows who the dad is -- not even the knocked up actress..."

Spare me, please.

The live coverage follows in reverse chronological order, with the most recent items on top. All times are EST.

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