“I don’t know anybody under 30 who has ever looked at a classified advertisement in a newspaper.”

Rupert Murdoch, quoted in the Financial Times.

Well, he may have misunderstood the Internet the first time around, but he certainly gets it now. News Corporation has spent $1.5bn so far this year on MySpace.com, a fast-growing online community, and IGN Entertainment, a games and content site, Murdoch responded to the recent claim by Martin Sorrell, a leading advertising honcho, that some traditional media owners were “panic buying” new media assets. Quoth the Digger:

“There’s no panic, and there’s certainly no overpayment. 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 already.”