Mr Murdoch recently sold the educational supplements of the British Times because he thought they were too dependent on classified advertising.
It is easier to search through job and property listings on the web, so classified advertising and its associated revenue is migrating onto the internet.
In the consumer-driven market for classified advertising, for instance, ordinary people instinctively grasped the efficiencies of online sites such as Craigslist, thus causing a drop in classified revenues at newspapers.
There was subscription revenue, classified advertising and display advertising.
Earlier this month online monitoring firm Hitwise found that visits to classified advertising websites were booming, with visits to such sites in the US up 84% on the same time last year.
The group, which publishes the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, The People, Daily Record and Sunday Mail, as well as 160 local and regional newspapers, has struggled to cope with falling circulations and the transfer of classified advertising to the internet.
Dislodging Craigslist from its place atop the ad market would be hard even without litigation because classified advertising is a classic example of network effects: Craigslist gets so many listings because people know it is the leading site, so their ad will be widely seen.
The papers are seeing their classified-advertising revenue for homes, cars, travel and jobs dwindle as more of it moves online.
Craigslist , the online classified-advertising service, is a good place to start.
They assumed they had a lock on local advertising to individuals with their papers' classified ad departments, and on major advertisers like auto manufacturers, auto dealers and movie distributors and theaters with their display ads.
FORBES: The accepted wisdom that the customer is king is all wrong.
Some of the biggest threats to newspaper profits have come from Web sites like Craigslist and Monster.com, online advertising venues that are chipping away at newspapers' classified ad sections.
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