Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Wall Street Journal, announced plans yesterday to begin charging for access to the newspaper on mobile devices suche as the Blackberry or iPhone.
Murdoch, speaking to financial analysts at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia XVIII Conference in New York, also predicted that print newspapers would be extinct within 20 to 30 years, replaced by portable electronic readers.
"Starting in a month or two, people who are getting The Wall Street Journal on their Blackberry are going to be paying $2 (Bt67) a week," Murdoch said. "Same with the iPhone." Mobile access to the Journal would cost $1 a week for subscribers to the newspaper, the News Corp chairman and chief executive said.
News Corp, he added, was looking at ways to begin charging users of popular online video website Hulu.com.
News Corp is a partner in Hulu.com, a fast-growing rival to YouTube that offers full-length television shows and movies, along with The Walt Disney Co and NBC Universal.
"Are we looking at Hulu with a view to adding subscription services there and pay per view? Yes, we are looking at that," Murdoch said, although cautioning that "no decision had been made yet".
Murdoch dismissed suggestions that News Corp, which owns MySpace, the Fox television network, the 20th Century Fox movie studio and the STAR and SKY television networks, in addition to its newspaper properties, had become more of an entertainment empire than a news operation.
"We're living in a very complicated world in which news is more valuable than it has ever been," he said. "If we were Newspaper Corp I would say yes, we would certainly change [the name]."
He said "way over a million" people were paying for online access to The Wall Street Journal, numbers that are "expanding all the time".
Some 25,000 people have subscribed to read the Journal on Amazon's e-reader, the Kindle, he added.
Murdoch said he personally did not enjoy reading a newspaper on the Kindle but e-readers were the future of newspapers.
"I don't think it's months away, I think it's years away," he said of completing a satisfactory e-reader. "But I do certainly see the day when more people will be buying their newspapers on reading panels, portable, foldable panels, than buying it on crushed trees," he added.
"I think that is certainly coming. It may be 20 years before it totally replaces newspapers. It may be 30."
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