So what's all the fuss about, Rupert?
Everyone is talking about Rupert Murdoch's speech in London on Monday night as an astonishing, bold statement on the impending death of mainstream media.

Am I missing something?

Murdoch may have noted that the age of the blogger is upon us, and the media industry is subject to the kind of change that may affect businesses who assume their markets will stay static - but this is hardly revolutionary stuff. You could say the same for media when commercial radio emerged, when newsreels were in cinemas, when television was introduced, when the internet emerged in the mid 1990s. Just because blogs emerged as a force about five years after the World Wide Web went commercial doesn't mean that this is the first time that newsprint has been challenged. Even with all the blogs emerging every day, it's still true that the majority of them are either disused or only rarely updated, and when they are, bloggers are slightly more likely to hyperlink to mainstream media press articles (as indeed this post does) than to another blog.

But importantly, while Murdoch does say that the power of old elite of mainstream media is beging challenged by the bloggers, he doesn't actually suggest that journalism is dying. Indeed he makes it quite clear that change in the way mainstream media offer content to readers will undoubtedly extend the importance of media institutions to the masses.

Yet bloggers everywhere are lauding this speech as the death of the Media Baron. Either we heard different speeches or some readers have been taken in by what appears to be a rather rich diet of corporate rhetoric.