Downloading The Daily news took about 3 minutes

The iPad is counting Day One of The Daily, the first everyday newspaper created for the iPad and iOS. A massive download of the free app, plus three minutes of downloading each issue a day (on demand) gives you plenty to talk about with clients on visits: News, Gossip, Opinion, Arts & Life, Apps and Games, and Sports (sections of the paper)

Of note: No specific business section. The publishers, after all, also own The Wall Street Journal, which has its own app and subscription needs. The Daily is produced by the biggest news organization on Earth, News Corp. Not a peep yet about whether the app is headed for the Android tablets, as well. If that happens, it may offer a metric to measure popularity — how well will this first tablet-only newspaper do in these two markets.

There’s photos to view and video to play inside the stories of The Daily, up to 100 articles worth of coverage per day. In this app release, The Daily joins the ranks of Zinio, which for almost a year has been a digital newsstand for iPad and iPhone and Mac owners, selling weekly and monthly publications like The Economist or Smart Money. Zinio has been previewed a slick new version of its app, set to release around the time the new iPads start shipping. Both Zinio and The Daily provide social network sharing of articles, as well as pushing copy via email. Great for researching for staff projects.

The Daily is a grand experiment in stalling the decline of the newspaper. Big metro dailies, which may have given you something to chat up with local clients during your coffee-shop meetings, have seen circulation dive. The LA Times is reported to have gone from 1 million subscribers to 600,000 on daily issues over the last few years.

There are other ways of getting iPad-ready news, for research as well as social sharing. Zinio’s got multiple-platform ability: Macs and PCs, as well as phones. And the New York cousin of the Times is pushing software that delivers papers to anything that can run Adobe Air — which eliminates the iPad and iPhone.

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Here on Bites of Apple we focus on small and medium business use of Apple solutions, with an emphasis on partner and third party offerings. But this is a vast universe of reporters and Web sites. The best way to start with an overview is Alltop.

Take a poke into mac.alltop.com to see how many sites, organized by expertise, are reporting and analyzing what’s happening this week. Many have RSS feeds to let you stay current, once you find one that fills your needs Alltop also operates education aggregation pages, as well as ones for photo creatives.