Rupert Murdoch has told US newspaper editors that they will have to ditch their "God-like" attitude to their readers and create an open and more democratic relationship with bloggers and other web users if they want to survive and prosper in the digital age.

Mr Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, the parent company of The Times, described himself as a "digital immigrant" who grew up in a world where information was highly centralised and controlled by the decisions of editors.

But the internet had changed all that, Mr Murdoch said in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington last night. "My two young daughters will be digital natives. They'll never know a world without ubiquitous broadband internet access."

"Scarcely a day goes by without some claim that new technologies are fast writing newsprint's obituary," Mr Murdoch said.

"Yet, as an industry, most of us have been remarkably, unaccountably complacent. Certainly, I didn't do as much as I should have after all the excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room did the same, quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along.

"Well it hasn't. It won't. And it's a fast-developing reality that we should grasp as a huge opportunity to improve our journalism and expand our reach."

The stock market flotation last year of Google Inc, the search engine company now valued at more than $50 billion, and a new wave of consolidation among major internet players in recent month has shown the renewed interest among investors in online businesses.

The News Corporation chairman is clearly among them. He cited a prediction from Microsoft's Bill Gates that the internet will be attracting $30 billion in advertising a year within the next five years - as much as the entire newspaper industry generates now.

"Whether Bill's math is right is almost beside the point," he added. "What is indisputable is the fact that more and more advertising dollars are going online, and we must be in a position to capture our fair share. The threat of losing print advertising dollars to online media is very real. In fact, it's already happening, particularly in classifieds."

But Mr Murdoch said that the major challenge facing newspaper editors was a cultural one - to understand and connect with the new generation of internet users in order to take their fair share of burgeoning online advertising revenues.

"The digital native doesn't send a letter to the editor any more. She goes online and starts a blog. We need to be the destination for those bloggers," he said. "At the same time, we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net."

The key, he says, is working out how the next generation will access news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source.

Mr Murdoch cited a recent study from the Carnegie Corporation that indicates that, for people 18 to 34, the web is increasingly the medium of choice for news. Forty-four per cent of the study's respondents said they used a portal at least once a day for news, compared with 19 per cent who use a printed newspaper on a daily basis.

"While local TV news remains the most accessed source of news, the internet – and, more specifically, internet portals – are quickly becoming the favoured destination for news among young consumers," he said.

"They don't want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what's important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don't want news presented as gospel."

"Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle.

"Think about how blogs and message boards revealed that Kryptonite bicycle locks were vulnerable to a Bic pen. Or the Swiftboat incident. Or the swift departure of Dan Rather from CBS. One commentator, Jeff Jarvis, puts it this way: give the people control of media, they will use it. Don’t give people control of media, and you will lose them."

History shows that the death of newspapers has been called before, particularly with the advent of television. Although television has not proven to be a direct competitor, neither has it been a natural fit as a partner to newspapers, Mr Murdoch says.

"That is manifestly not true of the internet. And all of our papers are living proof," he says. "Yet how many of us can honestly say that we are taking maximum advantage of those websites to serve our readers, to strengthen our businesses or to meet head-on what readers increasingly say is important to them in receiving their news?"

Despite the challenges, Mr Murdoch says he is confident that newspapers will survive in both print and electronic forms, as long as they do not look down on their readers.

"But our internet versions can do even more, especially in providing virtual communities for our readers to be linked to other sources of information, other opinions, other like-minded people."

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