After stories that Rupert Murdoch had binned his adventurous newspaper app project, his son James has said Project Alesia is going ahead, whether other newspapers want their content aggregated or not.
He told the assorted crowd at Morgan Stanley's TMT conference yesterday in Barcelona that "it's more about bundling digital journalism subscriptions," and that it's " very, very exciting." Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.
While other newspaper publishers haven't come to a decision as to what he calls "bundling" (the idea for Alesia is that it'll be a one-stop shop for various newspapers' articles), he did confirm that News Corp is working on two tablet projects at the moment. According to Murdoch, "these really are becoming our flagship products, even though they are very much in their infancy."
Last month when news broke that News Corp was pulling the plug on Project Alesia, it was said that the hundreds of people working on the project would be transferred to other parts of the company. There's no word on whether their jobs on Project Alesia have been saved, but considering News Corp has invested over $30 million into it already, it's no wonder they're loathe to ditch the project after all. [FT]
UPDATE: The second project, called The Daily, is apparently Rupert Murdoch's number one most exciting project right now. Due to launch by the end of the year, they've supposedly scooped up Sasha Frere-Jones (music critic at The New Yorker) to be The Daily's culture editor.