Rupert Murdock, Digital Migrant

Posted on April 14, 2005

Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp. lit a fire under newspaper executives in a fiery speech Wednesday to the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. In the early days of the Internet, Murdoch said he underestimated the power of the Net, calling himself and those his age "Digital Migrants": those who didn't grow up using the Internet but who are now forced to use it to compete in business. Murdoch said that newspaper editors and executives have just sat and watched on the sidelines as an entire generation of readers has shunned print newspapers, getting all their news from the Internet.

The problem for print newspapers is that even if they are proactive about enticing readers back to print, we think it's unlikely to happen. The reality is that the current generation of children are so comfortable with computers and technology that it seems unlikely that they'll ever read print newspapers every day. But that doesn't mean that they won't read newspapers: it just means they'll be reading them in a different format. When the technology is perfected, people will read the newspaper on an electronic reading device which uses E-Ink, and which downloads a new edition every day. That's what we think, anyway.