Huffington. is launched as a paid weekly iPad magazine

The premier issue of Huffington., the new weekly tablet magazine from Huffington Post, has been released. And, somehow, between when it was first suggested and today, it has morphed from a free weekly drawn from the HuffPo's daily content into a paid magazine with original content.

"We thought long and hard about it, and in our view, we felt that this is a highly stylized, curated experience," said Huffington Post executive editor Tim O'Brien, who gave several reporters a preview on Tuesday afternoon. "We feel it's a premium product and it deserves to carry a price with it in order to access all the value we're giving people."

The magazine will be free for the first month and then will cost $0.99 an issue, $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year.  HuffPo struck a deal with Apple in April to sell the publication on Apple's iNewsstand.

According to a story in Capital, a New York website, the magazine has a full-time, in-house staff of two dozen, including designers who've worked at Bloomberg Businessweek, Fortune and Men's Health, and editors who previously worked for Huffington Post.

O'Brien described the publication -- which offers a typical front-middle-back magazine structure and has a feature well with longer form articles -- it as "a nice, long meal that you can sit with and digest over the course of the weekend." The publication will be coming out Fridays, but with a Sunday dateline.