First Details of The Daily: Six Sections, Sudoku, Interactive Articles

The Daily, News Corp.’s much anticipated iPad-only newspaper, will be announced tomorrow with a media event at New York’s Guggenheim museum. The publication is the result of months of collaboration between Murdoch’s News Corp. and Apple, which will send VP of Internet Services Eddy Cue to join Murdoch on stage for the presentation. The Daily, in fact, will be based on a new subscription system created by Apple that will allow users to receive fresh content every morning through an iTunes’ push feature.

According to All Things Digital, Rupert Murdoch is hosting a private event for selected journalists tonight at his apartment to show them an exclusive preview of The Daily. People familiar with the matter report that The Daily will feature highly interactive graphics and videos, crossword puzzles and even Sudoku. The app will look like a traditional newspaper with bold headlines and photography organized in six sections, although some articles will resemble “iPhone apps” with pinch to zoom gestures and no text at all. 3D video won’t be enabled in the first version, but it will come in a future update. A first leaked image of the app indeed suggested The Daily will be heavily based on graphics.

Other people who have seen The Daily claim it will look like the interactive and animated newspaper from the Harry Potter movies, The Daily Prophet:

A Daily-watcher who thinks the thing is amazing compares it to The Daily Prophet, the magical newspaper read by Harry Potter and his wizard pals.

More jaded observers tell me it’s more or less what they’ve seen in existing iPad magazine apps, particularly Hearst’s Popular Mechanics and Conde Nast’s Wired. The big difference is that those magazines come out monthly, and the Daily will get beamed to your iPad… daily.

The app will have a companion website with a free sample of some stories, but the real, full content will be beamed directly to users on their iPad in the morning, and perhaps during the day for breaking news. Rumors suggest The Daily is designed and built to behave like a regular newspaper with a new edition in the first hours of each day. It’s still unclear whether the new subscription feature of iTunes will be enabled with an iOS software update, or through a new system on Apple’s backend, the same that powers iTunes and the App Store.