Rupert Murdoch, chief executive and chairman of News Corporation, said yesterday Apple’s new iPad had the potential to be “the saving of the newspaper industry”.
During an interview at the National Press Club at George Washington University, Murdoch praised the device saying: “I got a glimpse of the future last weekend with the Apple iPad. It is a wonderful thing.”
In a report in the Guardian he is quoted as saying: “If you have less newspapers and more of these… it may well be the saving of the newspaper industry”.
Murdoch discussed the newly launched device before moving onto the well-worn territory of search engines “stealing content” from his newspapers.
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“We are going to stop Google and Microsoft from taking stories for nothing… there is a law of copyright and they recognise it,” Murdoch said in what is becoming an all-to-familiar line of stinging crticisms about the way search engines operate.
In November 2009 Murdoch opened the flood gates on this topic as he outlined a plan to block Google from indexing his newspaper’s content by introducing paywalls to his online publications.
During yesterday’s interview, Murdoch said he said that he wanted to “force” news consumers to “change their habits”.
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“When they have got nowhere else to go they will start paying… No one is going to ask a lot of money,” he said.
Murdoch intends to start charging for content on his Times and Sunday Times websites in June of this year.
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