OUR DIGITAL FUTURE

Amid the big shift from print to the Internet, Rupert Murdoch, who has a foot in each camp as chairman and chief executive officer of the News Corp., probably knows more than most about what’s ahead.

He foresees at least 20 or 30 more years for the print version of The Wall Street Journal, which he took over last December and is busy transforming, but says he is neutral about whether people read it from newsprint or online. He predicts that its Web site “will be more and more powerful, and it will be profitable.”

What’s more, although he once promised that the online edition would be free, he says that 1.1 million users are already paying $50 a year, and he expects subscribers to be paying $150 in three or four years. He wants to serve the “most influential, most affluent, best-educated people” who want something more than the “local sports, local parish news” that he says most people get from their local newspaper.

But other parts of his media empire already reach the masses. He bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million and already claims 120 million visitors, including 40 percent of American mothers. He boasts that MySpace is two or three times as big as FaceBook and a “true social network” as compared with a mere utility that puts people together.

Mr. Murdoch, who was interviewed in the June 9 edition of his own newspaper, also suggests that he may find a way to get into the movie theater business, since, as he puts it, “If there are good movies, people want to go see them. They want to get out of their home occasionally, particularly young people.”

As for the future of newspapers, he says the publishers are going to have to put up with 10 percent margins instead of the 30 percent that many enjoyed before papers started losing readers and advertising. He warned against increasing competition from free newspapers.

As many newspapers cut back on their Washington and foreign bureaus as well as investigative reporting, a few of the big papers such as the Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post continue to supply national and international news. But a new nonprofit news organization, ProPublica, led by Paul E. Steiger, former top editor of the Journal, is assembling a team of 25 full-time reporters to provide free news articles starting soon on its own Web site and to leading news organizations,

Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer predicts that within 10 years all news and advertising will be delivered electronically with no newspapers or magazines delivered in paper form.

Whether that is an extreme view or not, the media picture is drastically changing.