We knew Rupert Murdoch was enamored with tablets like iPad. Turns out, News Corp (NSDQ: NWS). is such a big fan, it’s planning to launch a new national U.S. news title via iPad and mobile phone apps.

The offering would be paid for via subscription, produced both by a dedicated reporting team and with content from News Corp.‘s New York Post and Dow Jones, and would be headed by New York Post executive editor Jesse Angelo, LA Times’ report says. We understand the report, which says News Corp could invest $30 million to $40 million in the venture, is accurate.

Content would be “short, snappy”, like those from the Post, but also “lengthy journalistic articles”, the report says.

Much of this, of course, spins on from last month’s FT report that News Corp is looking at building a dedicated tablets business unit, which had already said the company wanted to create a new paid title with original content, some written by the two stablemate publications.

Rupert Murdoch is excited by the apparent prospect that tablet users might buy in to packaged news products in the same way they do newspapers, even beginning to speculate about an actual switch from print to tablets at some point in the timeline.

Two weeks back, he repeated his belief the iPad is “a game-changer altogether”: “Mobile technology will transform the print business. We’re going to see, around the world, hundreds and hundreds of millions of these devices - we’ve got to develop our methods of presentation of news.”

While WSJ has a subscription iPad app, the Post has just a free photojournalism app. But News Corp’s consumer titles in the UK and Australia - The Times, The Sun and The Australian - already have subscription iPad editions.

Most news publishers are still engaged in a strategy of spreading their existing brands on to each available new medium, or “touchpoint”. So why is News Corp launching a new title, and why go nationwide?

Bear in mind that, while News Corp. enjoys success in countries where the market is small enough that national consumer titles can dominate over provincials, the equivalent U.S. national segment is comparatively weak, hampered partly by the nationwide distribution challenges that come with paper and dominated instead by metropolitan titles…

Remove paper, however, and we may begin to find a business logic in this development—a belief, perhaps, that tablets can help Murdoch occupy the U.S. consumer newspaper market in the same way The Sun does in the UK and the Post enjoys in The Big Apple.

One problem with this theory - it’s not as if there’s a shortage of this kind of news on other apps, nor on websites that many of these tablet devices will also offer access to.

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