Newspapers produced by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in Australia will no longer be available free on the internet from next year.

The chief executive of News Corp's digital arm, Richard Freudenstein, confirmed the move today.

But Mr Freudenstein told ABC radio's PM program The Australian newspaper and tabloids like Sydney's Daily Telegraph and Melbourne's Herald-Sun were unlikely to follow the lead of the London Times, which has put all its content behind a so-called paywall.

"I think we're quite attracted to the Wall Street Journal model where you get the benefit of still getting a lot of your advertising revenue, combining it with the ability to market yourself to a whole range of people, and then up-selling them into the paid part of the site," Mr Freudenstein said.

"The Wall Street Journal ... who have a very, very successful model for their digital product, have about 50 per cent of their news stories that are free and about 50 per cent that are apparently paid for."

He says Mr Murdoch is happy with that approach but that the transition will take some time.

"We're currently in the process of building the technology to launch these sites and that actually takes a little while," he said.

"If you look at any subscription business, if you want to build the right subscription technology, the right publishing technologies, it takes a little while.

"Next year we'll start launching these sites.

"We've already launched The Australian app and today The Daily Telegraph and the Herald-Sun app on iPads.

"We'll launch apps for our other metropolitan newspapers and then the websites will have it next year."

Mr Freudenstein says the price is yet to be announced.

"In the long-term there are significant savings in publishing the digital form as opposed to the printed product and you've identified newsprint, production, distribution, all those things," he said.

"So clearly the economics are very different.

"Having said that, the economics around advertising revenues need to be fully worked out as well because it will be a dual revenue stream of advertising and subscription.

"So we haven't announced the price. We've announced the price for our apps today at $7.99 and we'll be announcing the price for the overall package in due course."

Facebook and Twitter

He says a very big way young people consume news today is through social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

"You have to be part of that to be relevant to that audience," he said.

"So we will be setting up ways that you'll be able to and rules around being able to share articles that you have paid for, potentially with people who haven't paid for it.

"But there'll be rules around that so it's not abused. But it absolutely has to be part of our strategy."

While editors in America and Europe say newspapers may no longer exist in 10 to 15 years, Mr Freudenstein says the time-frame for papers in Australia is much longer.

"There is a clear change in the way people are consuming media but I think the decline you've seen in some US papers, most US papers, Wall Street Journal being the exception, comes down a lot to the fact that editors at some of those papers lost focus on their audience, lost focus on what they were doing and that precipitated the decline," he said.

"Our editors are very focused on continuing to serve their audiences and grow their business.

"It is absolutely true that over time newspaper circulation will decline but I just think that in Australia that is further off."