Murdoch and Jobs collaborating on new tablet newspaper?

In what could see the coming together of two of the scariest media empires in the world, rumours reach us that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Apple have been secretly collaborating on a tablet-based newspaper called The Daily, and it’s set to launch early next year.
As the Guardian tells it, Apple and Jobs have no influence over the content of the publication, but Apple engineers have been helping News Corp develop technology to deliver The Daily seamlessly to iPads (similar to the Amazon Kindle’s Whispersync).
From what we can tell News Corp is betting heavy on the new format – having employed around 100 journalists to occupy an entire floor of its New York offices, and another bureau based in Los Angeles.
The new staff are handpicked from other News Corp properties, including the UK’s Sun, The New York Post and New Yorker.  There is also a vague mention of the publication being made available on tablets other than the iPad – we can’t help but feel that confining the new periodical to only Apple’s slate would be another misstep in Murdoch’s already wonky online strategy.
The Daily is said to be mainly US-centric and will combine “a tabloid sensibility (huh?) with a broadsheet intelligence”.  Due to the low costs involved with producing content online (no printing presses, no distribution etc.), The Daily will retail for only $0.99 per week.
Steve Jobs is obviously keen to shore up a periodicals ecosystem around iTunes to complement the iBooks store.  Amazon already has a healthy number of quality newspapers who publish daily on Kindle devices, however those same corporations have been wary of submitting to the whim of Jobs after witnessing the iron-fist rule Cupertino now has over much of the music industry.