MySpace and Rudd virtual friends 

Kevin Rudd owes much of his electoral success to his willingness to embrace new technology and engage with younger Generation Y voters, according to the internet social networking site MySpace.

"A significant part of the success of the Labor Party was that they embraced the new world," MySpace Australia general manager Rebekah Horne told a conference on the future of journalism in Sydney.

"They really engaged with the audience."

"We tried to engage the other party, and they just weren't interested," she said today.

Horne said that during Labor's successful campaign to oust John Howard from office last November, Mr Rudd had officiated at a MySpace launch and had attracted 27,000 "friends" to his internet site.

Other speakers addressed the demise of newspapers but said there was cause for optimism among journalists.

"I am pessimistic about journalism, in the form of ink on paper, surviving," said Philip Meyer, author of The Vanishing Newspaper and a media studies professor at North Carolina University.

"But I am optimistic we will find an online model which serves the public and makes money and is fun," he said by video link from the US.

"I think that will emerge from experimentation over the next 10 years."

"We must learn from our mistakes."

"The more failures we have, the more we will learn."

Asked about the possibility of good online journalism being rewarded with voluntary payments from users, in a style similar to what has happened in the music industry, he replied: "That is such a good idea that I'm tempted to pass it off as my own".

Kath Hamilton, media director for Yahoo 7, said young people were no longer sitting at home watching television for two hours at a time.

They were doing several things at once, using radio and TV, the internet and their iPods simultaneously in what was known as "continual partial attention", she said.

Cinnamon Pollard, youth product manager for Fairfax Digital, said Generation Y media users were interested in three things.

They wanted to participate - vote, have their say and upload files - they wanted to express themselves, and they wanted peer recognition.

They wanted what one pundit called their "15 megabytes of fame".

"They need to feel they can become famous," she told the conference, organised by the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance.