What's the news on newspapers?

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: In a radio broadcast delivered this weekend, media mogul Rupert Murdoch took on those who he said have been writing the newspaper’s obituary. Saying that the real business of newspapers wasn’t printing on dead trees but providing news that readers could trust, he argued that the ones that delivered on this promise would see gains in circulation— through web pages, RSS feeds, customised emails and cell phones.

The World Association of Newspapers data doesn’t puncture Murdoch’s buoyancy. Paid newspaper sales globally went up 2.57% in 2007 and 9.39% over the past five years, with India’s going up by a healthy 11.22% and 35.51% in the same periods. Also, the number of newspaper titles increased in every region except North America, up by 5.3% in Asia. The continent also publishes 74 of the world’s 100 bestselling dailies, with China, Japan and India accounting for 62 of these.

Two publications Murdoch mentioned are particularly interesting. The Economist, which once embraced the slogan “not read by millions of people”, has seen its global sales double to 1.3m in the last decade. The Wall Street Journal, which Murdoch purchased last year, has defied the double-digit circulation slumps of various American newspapers to increase its subscriptions. Their recipe for success according to Murdoch is turning news papers into news brands,building on an incalculable reservoir of trust that outdraws attention even on the web. With Pew research also finding American believability ratings for major online news outlets lower than for print ones, he seems to have a point about how loyalty-inspiring editors can counteract the web assault.