MURDOCH: NEWSPAPERS ARE DOOMED

Not because of declining readership, but from dried-up ad revenue, says Rupert Murdoch, owner of much of the free world's media. The Guardian reports:

Rupert Murdoch has forecast a gloomy future for newspapers with the growth of the internet, saying he doesn't know "anybody under the age of 30 who has ever looked at a classified ad".

The owner of the Sun, Times, Sunday Times and the News of the World, who once described newspaper classified advertising revenue as providing "rivers of gold", now says: "Sometimes rivers dry up".

"This is a generational thing; we've been talking about a 15- or 20-year slide on this," the News Corp chairman and chief executive tells trade paper Press Gazette in a rare interview.

"Certainly I don't know anybody under 30 who has ever looked at a classified advertisement in a newspaper. With broadband they do more and more transactions online."

They can get porn on broadband, too. Take that, newspapers.