Welcome to Our Lair, Murdoch Says to Bloggers

In a speech at the American Society of Newspaper Editors' conference, News Corporation chief executive Rupert Murdoch pondered the impact that the growth in online news is having on newspapers. "The trends are against us," he warned. Murdoch also mused on the possibilities of harnessing bloggers to the corporate news cart. "We need to be the destination for those bloggers. We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented." Newspapers might experiment with using bloggers to extend coverage, he suggested. However, Murdoch cautioned that bloggers could pose a risk to "our standards for accuracy and reliability."