The Guardian Open Platform | Open Platform. Idio | Personalized Publishing Platform. Real-time Discovery Engine - YourVersion: Discover Your Version of the Web™ Rupert Murdoch vs. the Internet - Business. Sixteen years ago, an eternity in Internet years, media mogul Rupert Murdoch became one of the first newspaper publishers to venture online. In a now-forgotten deal, his sprawling News Corp. empire snapped up Delphi Internet Services, one of America’s first dial-up providers, with a plan to meld it with his newspaper and TV content. Analysts were ecstatic at the prospects. “Rupert Murdoch has bought an electronic engine for his media empire,” one gushed. But the engine didn’t just sputter; it more or less failed to start altogether.
Since then the newspaper industry has been marred by bankruptcies, mass layoffs and plunging advertising sales as publishers stumbled from one flawed Internet strategy to another. Just last month Editor & Publisher, the 125-year-old industry bible that has chronicled scores of newspaper closures, was forced to write its own obituary online, ahead of its final January issue. Murdoch has vowed to back up his tough talk with action.