Rupert delivered a major speech at the World Media Summit in China late last week. Click here for a full copy While focused on China, it would make interesting reading to any newsagent. Here is a small quote:
The challenge of fusing past and present is real for media companies, and for China. Our aim must be to enhance the lives of our customers and citizens, and yet we find ourselves in the midst of an information revolution that is both exciting and unsettling. It is a digital revolution turning traditional business models upside down … traversing geographic, industrial, and media boundaries … and creating a new source of wealth, material and social, around the world.
He also addresses the issue of paying for content. A case he has to make for the future viability of News Corp. and other media companies.
Too often the conventional media response to the internet has been inchoate. A medium once thought too powerful has often seemed impotent in the past few years. Of course there should be a price paid for quality content, and yet large media organizations have been submissive in the face of the flat-earthers who insisted that all content should be free all the time. The sun does not orbit the earth, and yet this was precisely the premise that the press passively accepted, even though there have been obvious signs that readers recognize the reality that they should pay a price.
Read what some others say about the speech: Newsweek, Jeff Jarvis, Danny Sullivan and the Village Voice.