Rupert Murdoch has again voiced his view that journalism in future increasingly will be transmitted electronically, rather than via traditional newspapers.

Mr Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, the parent company of The Times and Times Online, was speaking to the UK Press Gazette, as the journalists' trade magazine celebrates its 40th anniversary.

In a wide-ranging interview, he talked about the Wapping trade dispute of 20 years ago, and the future for the industry and his legacy to journalism.

"Great journalism will always be needed, but the product of their work may not always be on paper - it may ultimately just be electronically transmitted," Mr Murdoch said.

"But for many many, many years to come it will be disseminated on both. There will always be room for good journalism - and good reporting. And a need for it, to get the truth out."

Mr Murdoch defended his companies' recent acquisitions of new media properties, which have seen them collectively spend more than £500 million on a shopping basket of web properties, including myspace.com, the person-to-person site whose chief executive was in London for meetings with senior editorial figures last week, plus Scout Media, Easynet and IGN Entertainment. He denied that the companies bought had been overpriced.

"There was certainly no overpayment," he said. "It was a very careful strategy to go for the two biggest community sites for people under 30. If you take the number of page views in the US, we are the third biggest presence on the internet already.

"Now we're not the most profitable, or anything like it; we have a huge amount of work ahead to get that whole thing right. And we're working very hard to keep improving."

Mr Murdoch's view of the market is guided by the growing phenomenon of online advertising. "This is a generational thing," he said. "We've been talking about a 15- or 20-year slide on this. Certainly I don't know anybody under 30 who has ever looked at a classified advertisement in a newspaper.

"With broadband they do more and more transactions online."

Looking back on his impact on the newspaper industry in Britain, he said: "The unpleasantness of Wapping completely changed the economic model of newspapers in Britain. If it hadn't been for that there would certainly have been casualties by now.

"Remember that nobody in the private sector had won a strike of a major nature. And so we took them on and were the first to do it.

"And although we were abused by all sorts of people, including leading industrialists, who made portentous lectures on the BBC on how this was not the British way, or something, in fact it was a turning point - an absolute turning point for Fleet Street and the whole of the newspaper industry. But also a turning point, although to a slightly lesser extent, for the whole of British industry.

"Although it wasn't pleasant, I'm certainly very, very proud of it. And it'll be part of my legacy."

Mr Murdoch also paid tribute to his present editors at The Times and Sunday Times. "I think Robert Thomson is doing a fantastic job," Mr Murdoch said of The Times Editor. He bracketed Mr Thomson with Charles Douglas-Home and Sir Peter Stothard as "the most important editors of The Times in our fightback to relevancy.

"When we bought it, its circulation was under 300,000. Look at it now." Latest circulation figures have The Times's daily sale at more than 700,000.

Of its sister title, Mr Murdoch said, "The Sunday Times has never been better. John Witherow: a great editor, quietly getting a little bit better, week after week. Now it's got a complete sort of supremecy there."

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