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.

In contrast, the New York Times online venture is the subscriber-based Times Reader, since the NYT pay-wall is going up on the website very soon. Said Reader is powered by Adobe Air, so it’s a Linux-Mac-Windows laptop-desk app. Except that you will need to install Air, another of the things Flashy things Apple is leaving off its new MacBooks. Windows laptops don’t ship with Air installed, but they’ve got a recent vintage of Adobe’s Flash on their disk.

iPad owners can’t complain about the biggest news company in the world adopting the iPad, even if News Corp does run the shrill Fox News cable channel. There’s room for everybody’s opinions. The most interesting section of The Daily may be Gossip. Nobody does the dish like British tabloids — papers run by owner Rupert Murdoch, onstage at today’s intro of  The Daily. Unlike his Fox News chieftain Roger Ailes, Murdoch’s beliefs may influence the print/tablets products more than broadcast. (WSJ, however, is a bastion of business-first creeds. And so was born Fox Business News for TV consumption.)

Of course, people will assume, perhaps more correctly, that the NYT has the same editorial leanings as its print-web editions. After all, its content is pulled off another news source. We may learn that “fair and balanced” voice of Fox News won’t emerge in The Daily, aimed at a much more middle of the road audience than Fox News.

You can check out both of these online papers for free. The Daily is giving you two weeks to decide to spend 99 cents a month, billed recurring using a new version of the iTunes Store. NYT, needing the money much worse, is giving away two weeks, but billing you via your credit card using its own payment mechanism.

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.