Essentially, Rupert has made a large amount of money throughout his business lifetime from newspapers. Newspapers, particularly Rupert's have worked because th

Essentially, Rupert has made a large amount of money throughout his business lifetime from newspapers. Newspapers, particularly Rupert's have worked because they gain a monopoly (or oligopoly) position in a given town as a daily distributor of content and advertising. [1] Unfortunately, the internet has made distributing content on a daily basis to every household a much, much cheaper prospect and hence Rupert is looking at a business with much less value present. As a result, he doesn't like the Internet much and is a) looking for a scapegoat and b) trying to employ what little leverage he has left, in the form of legal threats. [1] It's worth noting that in most cases newspapers do not have a competitive advantage based on the quality of content they distribute, as short of things like the Wall Street Journal the quality is uniformly lackluster. [2] [2] Interestingly one of the strategies that newspapers have used to boost profitability have been to decrease the quality of their original content (investigative reporting and the like) and use cheap, easily sourced content (ie wire service stories, reprints of PR distributions and gossip). This has worked but has had the effect of eroding any competitive advantage the paper has held over other providers of content, like blogs. Essentially they've made rational short term decisions which have royally screwed them in the long term.