The PR profession has been speculating about Rupert Murdoch's latest offensive to convince the news industry to get on board with his paywall scheme by warning publishers that the advertising business model is dead.
He insisted that a business model that relied primarily on online advertising could not sustain newspapers over the long-term.
The reason, he added, was simple arithmetic and that although online advertising was increasing, that increase was only a fraction of what was being lost with print advertising.
Murdoch also lashed out at those newspapers that were winning masses of journalism prizes yet continued to see their circulations fall.
He said that even if the industry saw a revival in advertising revenue, it would not be sufficient to maintain the long-term survival of these newspapers.
The public relations industry has been watching developments closely ever since Murdoch began stamping his feet about a paid-content business model earlier in the year.
Many practitioners believe that this latest call is a clear sign of desperation and that Murdoch's plans would spell disaster for News Corp if other publishers didn't follow suit.
On the other hand, there are those that agree with Murdoch, especially given that since the migration to online there have been a far greater number of players to share the same finite pot of potential advertising revenue. And that would surely mean paid content is an inevitability.
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