Capturing the digital natives : the News Corporation agenda

News Corporation is converging text, audio, television, and animation to become the first fully globalised, integrated media consortium. The company is switching its emphasis from newspapers, which provided the launching pad for Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch, half a century ago, to new media. In doing so, News hopes to secure profits by addressing new ways in which news is created by and for younger audiences. Murdoch sees this process as capturing "digital natives". To facilitate these changes, News in 2004 moved its registration from South Australia, where it had its corporate origins, to the United States. Rupert Murdoch and his family had transformed News Limited from a regional Australian newspaper to News Corporation, a horizontally and vertically integrated multi media giant selling not just news but marketing its cultural packages across the United States, Europe, Asia and the Pacific. Australia, whose media was progressively dominated by News Corporation products =including newspapers, cinema, music, cable television and sport, became a consumer of these American accented products. As a result, Australia moved from the centre and source of News Corporation businesses to an increasingly remote corner of the corporate empire. This paper considers how the growth of News Corporation and the globalisation of its agendas impacted on Australian journalism, politics and culture. Murdoch meanwhile, describes News as the model for transnational media conglomerates in the 21st century