Rupert Murdoch’s best 545 million quotes*

IN HONOUR of Rupert Murdoch's significant Myspace loss, we celebrate his curmudgeonly awesomeness with a selection of his finest technology quotes. Admittedly there are not many, so we might have snuck one in from Myspace's new owner. There are no prizes for guessing which one.

On Steve Jobs, who has helped to make Murdoch's new paid for journalism business model a reality: "A man who has single handedly changing the world of technology and video" and led reporters to "completely reimagine our craft".

On completely reimaging the journalist craft with New York based trendy Ipad rag, The Daily: "New times demand new journalism. So we built The Daily completely from scratch -- on the most innovative device to come about in my time -- the iPad. The magic of great newspapers -- and great blogs -- lies in their serendipity and surprise, and the touch of a good editor. We're going to bring that magic to The Daily -- to inform people, to make them think, to help them engage in the great issues of the day. And as we continue to improve and evolve, we are going to use the best in new technology to push the boundaries of reporting."

The serendipity here is that we can't find a single person that's read it, which reminds us of this number: "In short we believe The Daily will be the model for how stories are told and consumed in this digital age."

He may have meant to say, "In short-sightedness, we believe...", but we have left this quote as published.

On how he's bringing sexy back: "Dirty babe. You see these shackles Baby I'm your slave. I'll let you whip me if I misbehave. It's just that no one makes me feel this way."

On old journalism, in an interview with the Australian: "There's a case that newspapers rushing on to the web to try and get a bigger audience and get more attention for themselves have damaged themselves. Now they're going to have to pull back from that and say `Hey, we're going to charge for this'."

On the competition: During an interview with Marvin Kalb for The Kalb report, the journalist brought up Google, Murdoch's online nemesis, and heard this, "We're going to stop people like Google and Microsoft and whoever from taking our stories for nothing."

And on the resulting paywalls: "You'll find, I think, most newspapers in this country are going to be putting up a pay wall," he said. "I think when they've got nowhere else to go they'll start paying."

Perhaps though, the words that will ring the loudest and truest in Rupert's ears as he reads a bank statement that once showed $545m more than it does today, are these, "The current days of the Internet will soon be over."

For you Rupert, they might be.

If any INQUIRER readers would like to vote for their favourite quote - again, we must insist that there are no prizes, then please do so in the comments. Alternatively, if you think there are any we have missed, then you know what to do. µ