News Corp giving away its tablet newsstand plans, but still interested

31st October, 2010 by adina
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News Corp is said to have dropped its plans related to a news aggregation service targeting the web and tablets, Apple’s iPad being included. Purportedly a few weeks away from its launch, Project Alesia was considered to be too expensive to continue. A source from Brand Republic revealed that the British-based project would have needed £20 million (about $31.4 million) to be started and would have required another £1 million (equivalent of $1.6 million) for marketing.

About one hundred people were involved in the project and it is not known what they are doing now. Some of them are probably rolled into News International.

The intention of the project was to make available a paid, more tablet-ready alternative to some sites like Google News, which have been previously criticized by News Corp’s owner Rupert Murdoch for being believed to steal readers by allowing them to see part or an entire article free of charge by using its own pages. Murdoch has been trying to put many of his sites behind so-called “paywalls” that need a subscription to be unlocked. He has also become a fan of tablets as being paid gateways to information to such an extent that it is believed a national mobile newspaper would be in the works and would provide iPhones, iPads and other devices a unique offering.

News Corp still claims the idea has a huge value but it is not known where it would go due to investments in the paid publishing company Journalism Online. The firm may not search for an option for Apple’s devices during the next months, because Apple is supposed to work on and iPad-oriented newsstand to function as a companion to its iBookstore and allow publishers to deliver subscriptions, as the Amazon Kindle does, in the background.


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