Can Rupert Murdoch save the newspaper industry by making people pay to read the news online? Probably not, though his reputation as a financial wizard (he is many times a billionaire) has bewitched a lot of people into believing he can.

More importantly, does the newspaper industry as a whole need to be saved, or is this largely an American problem?

The "Dirty Digger" declared last week he would start charging for the online content of all his newspapers, including the New York Post and the Times and the Sun in London, before next June.

In the United States, where many if not most big-city dailies are in a financial "death-spiral" (as one editorial page editor put it to me last year, explaining why she was taking the buy-out and retiring early), the whole industry prayed that he was right.

Murdoch's reputation as a master of the media universe is so high that even his competitors hope that he can make it work.

"I believe that if we're successful, we'll be followed fast by other (print) media," he said, and that's perfectly true. But past experience argues that he won't be successful: there are too many free alternatives.

When the first newspapers began putting their content on the web 15 years' ago, they made it available free in the belief the online version would supplement rather than replace the highly lucrative print editions.

And in the hope that eventually online advertising would provide a healthy new stream of revenue.

But the online versions did cut into the print readership, and online advertising rates never rose to match those of the print editions. In the past couple of years, online revenues have ceased to grow entirely.

So when the recession came along, most American newspapers were already in a very vulnerable position, and now many are at death's door. I'm getting used to lawyers' letters from US dailies explaining that they are now in "Chapter 11" (bankruptcy protection), and so I can forget about what they owe me for the column as I am not a secured creditor. (However, they can pay me for articles I send in the future - the law is strange that way.)

Now, here's the odd thing. Large numbers of journalists have also been laid off by their papers in other countries, because advertising revenues and the actual physical size of most papers both shrink in a recession.

But this column runs in papers in almost 50 other countries in every continent except Antarctica, and not one of them has declared bankruptcy.

You can't explain it by saying that internet use has been lower in all of those countries. In fact, the United States has only recently caught up with most other developed countries in the proportion of its population that is online.

A likelier explanation for the American disaster is what happened to the US newspaper industry in the 1980s and 1990s.