Murdoch hails iPad as game changer

Global media baron Rupert Murdoch says Apple's iPad will be a "game changer" for newspapers.

The chairman and chief executive of News Corporation said the iPad would allow publishers to attract new readers to their mastheads.

"It's a real game changer in the presentation of news," Mr Murdoch said on Thursday during a conference call for the company's full year profit results.

"We will have young people reading newspapers. We will have different looking types of newspapers."

News Corp owns newspapers in the US, UK, Australia and elsewhere.

Its local titles include The Australian, Melbourne's Herald Sun, Sydney's Daily Telegraph, Brisbane's Courier Mail, Adelaide's The Advertiser, and Hobart's The Mercury.

Mr Murdoch said he expected to see hundreds of millions of these devices around the world.

"There will be all sorts of things we can do with them," Mr Murdoch said.

"As they develop technologically, we have got to to develop our methods of presentation of news."

The iPad went on sale in Australia at the end of May.

News Corp chief operating officer, Chase Carey, said the iPad "really starts to deliver on the promise of multimedia" for the first time.

The Australian's deputy chief executive, Nick Leeder, told a conference in Sydney on Wednesday about 8,500 people had paid $4.99 for the newspaper's iPad application in the month after its launch.

In terms of charging for online content, The Times and Sunday Times newspapers in the UK started slugging users STG1 ($A1.73) a day, or STG2 ($A3.46) a week, to access their content online from the start of July.

Mr Murdoch said there had been a positive response, but declined to say how many people had paid for subscriptions.

"We have had a very encouraging number of people subscribing at a good price," he said.

"But we think we are on the right strategy there and we think it's going well."

Mr Murdoch also flagged changes to News Corp's social networking portal MySpace, which he said was going through a major overhaul under a new management team.

"It will look very, very different in a few months to what it's looked for the last few years," Mr Murdoch said.

"We are going to see it out for some time yet."

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