News Corporation Limited

views updated May 29 2018

News Corporation Limited

2 Holt Street
Sydney, New South Wales 2010
Australia
(02) 288-3000
Fax: (02) 288-3424

Public Company
Incorporated: 1979
Employees: 30,700
Sales: A$8.76 billion (US$6.77 billion)
Stock Exchanges: Amsterdam Australia Hong Kong London New York New Zealand Paris Tokyo
SICs: 2711 Newspapers: Publishing, or Publishing & Printing; 2731 Books: Publishing, or Publishing & Printing; 4833 Television Broadcasting Stations; 7812 Motion Picture and Video Tape Production; 4512 Air Transportation, Scheduled

News Corporation Limited is the holding company for the range of enterprises created or acquired since the 1950s by the Australian-American businessman Rupert Murdoch. It is the largest publisher of English-language newspapers in the world, and its subsidiaries include HarperCollins Publishers, the world’s largest publisher of English-language books, as well as television stations, film production companies, printing firms, and airlines.

Rupert Murdoch was born in Melbourne in 1931, the son of Sir Keith Murdoch, managing director of the Herald and Weekly Times newspaper group. Sir Keith did not own many shares in the group, but was the major shareholder in News Ltd., which published the Adelaide News and Sunday Mail, and in a Brisbane company whose two newspapers he amalgamated into one, the Courier-Mail.

Sir Keith died in 1952. After graduating that year, his son spent some months as a junior subeditor at the London Daily Express and returned to Australia in 1953 to take over the Adelaide newspapers. His father’s executors sold the Courier-Mail to the Herald and Weekly Times group. In 1956 News Ltd. acquired the Perth Sunday Times; in 1957 it launched TV Week —inspired by the American TV Guide —which was to be the most profitable of all its Australian publications. In 1958 control of Channel 9, one of two TV channels in Adelaide, was awarded to Southern Television Corporation, in which News Ltd. had 60 percent of the shares. Murdoch’s empire-building had begun.

The year 1960 was a watershed. News Ltd. bought Cumberland Newspapers, a group of local papers in the Sydney suburbs, then acquired the Sydney Daily and Sunday Mirror from the Fairfax group. Rohan Rivett, the editor of the Adelaide News, became the first of many editors to be fired from Murdoch newspapers. Five weeks before his dismissal he had been celebrating his acquittal on charges of seditious libel. These had arisen out of the News’ s criticisms of a state government inquiry into the case of an Aborigine found guilty of a murder that Rivett, and Murdoch, thought he had not committed. His departure marked the end of Murdoch’s leanings toward anti-establishment views.

In 1964 News Ltd. launched The Australian, Australia’s first national newspaper, based in Canberra. Murdoch considered the venture prestigious enough to be worth a loss of A$30 million, over the course of 20 years, to keep going. Typesetting in Caberra and flying the matrices to Melbourne and Sydney for printing were difficult, and in 1967 the paper was moved to Sydney. In 1969 its latest editor oversaw its re-adoption of opposition to the Vietnam War, a return to the stance first espoused by the paper in 1965 when Australian troops were initially assigned there.

Murdoch, meanwhile, was in London. In October 1968 Robert Maxwell had offered to buy the United Kingdom’s News of the World Organization (NOTW) for £26 million. The company owned the Sunday newspaper News of the World, the Bemrose group of local newspapers, the papermaker Townsend Hook, and several other publishing companies. It had been run since 1891 by the Carr family, which had now split into two factions, one led by NOTW’s chairman, Sir William Carr, with 32 percent of the shares, the other by his cousin, Derek Jackson, whose decision to sell his 25 percent stake had precipitated the crisis. Maxwell, born in Czechoslovakia, was then a Labour member of Parliament. Maxwell’s foreign origin, combined with his political opinions, provoked a hostile response to his bid from the Carrs and from the editor of the News of the World, Stafford Somerfield, who declared that the paper was—and should remain—as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. News Ltd. arranged to swap shares in some of its minor ventures with the Carrs and by December it controlled 40 percent of the NOTW stock. In January 1969 Maxwell’s bid was rejected at a shareholders’ meeting where half of those present were company staff, temporarily given voting shares. Illness removed Sir William Carr from the chairmanship in June of 1969. Murdoch succeeded him. In 1977, just before his death, Can-wrote to Maxwell to express regret that he had spurned his original offer for NOTW. In 1990 the News of the World was the biggest-selling English-language newspaper in the world.

Murdoch next sought a British daily to accompany the News of the World. He found it in 1969, when IPC decided to sell off The Sun, which had been launched in 1964 but had never been profitable, with sales of about one million copies. Under Murdoch, by contrast, The Sun’s circulation reached two million in 1971 and three million in 1973.

NOTW had added television to its list of interests in 1969, when it bought eight percent of the voting shares in London Weekend Television (LWT), a company created in 1968 to run commercial television from Friday evening to Sunday night in a large and lucrative region centered on the capital city. The holding was rapidly built up to 36 percent of the voting shares and Murdoch became a non-executive director of LWT. He promptly saw to the dismissal of its managing director and took the chair of the executive committee in charge of scheduling, thus running the station without having been awarded a franchise. The Independent Television Authority ordered LWT to put its affairs in order without Murdoch in charge. The controversy over this incident was revived in 1977 when the government-appointed Committee on the Future of Broadcasting made severe criticisms of the authority’s failure to enforce its own rules. By that time, however, Murdoch had moved to the United States, and NOTW’s shares in LWT were sold in 1980.

Back in Australia, Murdoch found that The Australian had become too liberal for his liking. In 1971 he dismissed its editor, Adrian Deamer, who had been in the post for three years—a remarkable record, considering that the paper would have 13 editors in its first 16 years. In 1972 News Ltd. bought the Sydney Daily and Sunday Telegraph from Packer’s Consolidated Press, which had been losing circulation to the three Fairfax papers, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun, and the Sunday Sun-Herald. The ailing Sunday Australian was absorbed into the Sunday Telegraph soon afterward.

Murdoch had become close to Gough Whitlam, then leader of the Australian Labor Party, and gave A$75,000 to the party’s advertising campaign in 1972. If this was a return to Murdoch’s earlier radicalism, it was short-lived. Within three years his papers were attacking the Labor Party again, with The Australian, for example, using raw figures, rather than seasonally-adjusted ones, to suggest, wrongly, that unemployment was rising. After the 1975 election, in which Whitlam was defeated, Murdoch himself, using a “special correspondent” byline, wrote a report for The Australian on the Labor Party’s secret—and eventually fruitless—appeal to Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, for financial aid, which resulted in a meeting in Sydney between Whitlam and Saddam’s nephew. Ironically, what appeared to be just more anti-Whitlam propaganda was true.

In 1973 the News group made its first American acquisitions, purchasing three newspapers in San Antonio, Texas. One of these, the San Antonio News, achieved brief but worldwide notoriety in 1976 with the striking but inaccurate headline “Killer Bees Move North.” The next American acquisition, in 1976, was the New York Post, the city’s only evening paper. This was swiftly followed, early in 1977, by the purchase of the New York Magazine Company, which published the magazines New York and Village Voice. The acquisitions were, in fact, accomplished so quickly that New York’s proposed comment on the Post purchase, a picture of Murdoch as a killer bee, had to be dropped.

Murdoch’s personal supervision of the Post led to an increased circulation, most notably through a series of reports on the “Son of Sam” serial killings, culminating in the misleading headline “How I Became a Mass Killer” over a selection of old and innocuous letters from the murderer to a girlfriend. The Post did especially well in the summer of 1979 when, armed with separate agreements with the unions, a long-running strike kept its rivals closed. The paper continued to suffer from financial problems, caused partly by the reluctance of the large department stores to advertise in such a down-market publication.

Murdoch did not neglect the Australian sector of his growing empire. In 1978 News Ltd. joined forces with the Packer’s group and the British football pools company Vernons to start a New South Wales lottery. In 1979 it built up a 48.2 percent stake in Channel TEN-10, a Sydney television station. At the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal hearings into its purchase, Murdoch praised the work of its chairman and promised that the station would retain total independence without interference. Two weeks after the tribunal approved the change of ownership, the chief executive was replaced by a News Ltd. director with no television experience; two months later the chairman resigned.

A much bigger acquisition followed, also in 1979, when News Ltd. gained control of ATI, a group of airlines and other transport firms. Its founder, Sir Reginald Ansett, stayed on as chairman of ATI, but Murdoch became chief executive. Murdoch agreed with Sir Peter Abeles, the chairman of the TNT transport group, that News Ltd. and TNT should have 50-50 ownership of ATI and that Abeles should become joint chief executive. There then followed lengthy public hearings before the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal on whether News Ltd. should be allowed to own a Melbourne television station, the original goal of the ATI/TNT dealings. The tribunal decided against granting approval, mainly on the grounds that a Sydney-Melbourne combination under one company would have too big a role in network operations. By the time of the ruling, however, News Ltd. had paid for the station and the statutory six months allowed for ordering divestment had passed; the tribunal’s decision had no effect. The ruling was eventually reversed on appeal.

The current structure of Rupert Murdoch’s group of companies also dates from the creation of News Corporation as the main holding company in 1979. In 1990 Murdoch owned only 7,200 shares in News Corporation itself, but he also had control of Cruden Investments Pty Ltd., which owned more than 116 million shares, about 54 percent of the total.

In 1981 News International, the British arm of the Murdoch group, acquired 42 percent of the voting shares in the British publishers William Collins and Sons and bought the London Times, the Sunday Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Times Educational Supplement from what is now The Thomson Corporation. Fifteen years earlier, Lord Thomson’s own purchase of The Times and its supplements had been investigated by the Monopolies Commission, as Lonrho was to be investigated when it made a bid for the London Observer later in 1981. Yet the government of the day waived this requirement in News International’s case.

At the same time as News Corporation’s image was being pushed up-market by these ventures, its down-market newspapers were all engaged in attracting more readers with an adaptation of bingo. In Britain, Sun bingo cards were sent to every household, and rival papers all picked up the game. It then spread to the Sydney Daily Mirror and to the New York Post, where it had to be renamed Wingo for copyright reasons. The rival Daily News responded with its own version, Zingo. Murdoch has since disposed of the Post, but acquired the Boston Herald —formerly the Herald-American —in 1982 and the Chicago Sun-Times in 1984.

The Sun’s editors—Larry Lamb and, from 1981, his successor Kelvin McKenzie—brought the paper into line with Murdoch’s political views. Thus in 1982 the paper offered enthusiastic support to the British forces in the Falklands War (as almost all the national newspapers did), but characteristically went further, marking the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano with the headline “Gotcha!” and calling the BBC’s defense correspondent and two rival newspapers traitors. The Sun remains the biggest-selling daily newspaper in Britain.

Murdoch’s up-market papers could be tempted by sensationalism as well. In 1983 News Corporation was severely embarrassed by the revelation that the much-publicized secret diaries of Adolf Hitler, which the Sunday Times planned to serialize under an arrangement with the German magazine Stern, were forgeries. Lord Dacre, better known as the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who served as one of the “national” non-executive directors of Times Newspapers, first declared that the samples he had seen were genuine, then told the editor of the Sunday Times that they were forgeries just as the printing of the world exclusive story began. Murdoch decided to go ahead with the printing; Stern had to return the money it had paid for the diaries, and the Sunday Times actually retained some of the extra readers the story had attracted to it.

The appointment of Andrew Neil as editor of the Sunday Times later in 1983 negated the guarantees exacted from News International by the British government two years before, since the required consultation with the newspaper’s staff did not take place. Harold Evans had reluctantly resigned from the editorship of the Times in 1982, at Murdoch’s request. Evans could have appealed over Murdoch’s head to the “national” directors but chose not to do so, leaving the guarantees untested.

News Corporation first ventured into satellite television in 1983. It acquired majority holdings in Satellite Television PLC (SATV), which had been set up in 1980 to supply a U.K.-based service to northern Europe, and in the Inter-American Satellite Television Network, which was renamed Skyband Inc. and had its head office moved from California to New York. It was largely to gain access to a supply of feature films and television programs that News Corporation bought into the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, also in 1983. Twentieth Century Fox has since become a wholly owned subsidiary. Within two years, with the News International papers all featuring articles attacking the BBC, SATV, renamed Sky Channel, had about three million subscribers in 11 European countries and was available in Britain on cable.

During 1985 Murdoch and his closest advisers planned the removal of all the News International papers from the Fleet Street area, the traditional base for national newspapers, to a plant at Wapping, in east London, where troubled relations with the print unions could be superseded by a single union agreement with the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union (EETPU). Electronic typesetting equipment was ordered, but kept hidden from the print workers; the EETPU recruited new production staff, and then, when the plant was ready, the journalists on the four newspapers were given from one to three days to move or to leave the company and the plant began producing papers in January 1986. It was not only the 5,500 sacked print workers who felt somewhat betrayed after this dramatic move. The EETPU never did get a single union agreement, and News International does not recognize any trade unions. In 1987 the British company acquired a fifth newspaper, Today, from the company Lonrho—which had bought out the newspaper’s founder, Eddy Shah—soon after its launch in 1986.

While 1986 was a year of triumph for Murdoch in Britain, in Australia it was a year of retreat. News Ltd. sold off both Channel TEN-10 in Sydney and ATV 10 in Melbourne, as well as radio stations, a record company, and three newspapers. However, 1987 was the year of the acquisition of the Herald and Weekly Times group once run by Murdoch’s father. Shortly before the deal went ahead, Murdoch had a private meeting with the prime minister, Bob Hawke, and the treasurer, Paul Keating, and his Australian newspapers all switched political allegiance to Labor, the governing party. The purchase of the Herald and Weekly Times group cost A$2.3 billion, was the biggest single takeover of newspapers ever accomplished, and made News Corporation the largest publisher of English-language newspapers in the world. Shortly afterward the chairman of the Australian Press Council resigned in protest at the government’s failure to invoke the Foreign Takeovers Act against Murdoch, for by this time Murdoch had become an American citizen. It was not until 1989 that newly released government documents revealed that the Foreign Investment Review Board had opposed the acquisition, although Prime Minister Hawke declared that it had not.

News Corporation ended 1987 with two more purchases, the South China Morning Post, the most important English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, and the American publishing house Harper & Row. It then sold 50 percent of Harper & Row to William Collins and Sons. This arrangement lasted only until April of 1989, when News International bought Collins outright. HarperCollins Publishers, created as a merger of these and other book and map publishers, is now the largest English-language publisher in the world.

In 1988, three decades after he had borrowed its format for his own publication on television, Murdoch bought the American magazine TV Guide and the company that published it, Triangle Publications, for $2.83 billion. Fox Broadcasting Company started up during the same year as the first new television network in the United States to challenge the long-established trio of ABC, CBS, and NBC. Its huge initial costs were reduced, fortuitously, when a Hollywood writers’ strike allowed it to run a large number of repeats, and it broadcast at first only on Saturdays and Sundays.

In February 1989 Sky Television was launched in the United Kingdom as a four-channel service available at first only on cable but increasingly via satellite receiver dishes. By the summer of 1990 it was reaching 1.6 million households, but the losses incurred in its development were a major cause of declining profits for News Corporation, along with the eight-month-long airline pilots’ strike in Australia. It was claimed that profits would have been higher than in the financial year 1988-1989 if these two factors were excluded. Profits were also being eroded by the rising cost of interest payments on the group’s rising level of debts.

Murdoch had once said that he never gave anyone shares but just borrowed to finance expansion. The next year or two revealed the disadvantages of that policy, as the sale of his Australian book publishing and distribution companies in June of 1989 proved to be the start of a trend, though revenue and profits from most of News Corporation’s subsidiaries continued to grow. In 1990 it sold 49 percent of South China Morning Post (Holdings) Ltd., parts of its minority holdings in the news agency Reuters and in the publishers Pearson pic, the American publishing firm J.B. Lippincott, the British papermaker Townsend Hook, the Fox subsidiary DeLuxe Laboratories and the American magazines Star and Sportswear International. Its acquisitions that year—25 percent of the Spanish publisher Grupo Zeta; the whole of F. F. Publishing and Broadsystem Ltd. in Britain; and 50 percent holdings, with Hungarian partners, in two publishing companies, Mai Nap Rt and Reform Rt—were relatively minor.

One way around the group’s increasing financial problems was to juggle the figures in News Corporation’s annual reports. For example, the 1988 losses by News Ltd., the Australian division of the group, were shown as A$202 million in the 1989 report but as A$83 million in 1990, although the overall impact on group profits was said to be the same in both reports. Another way was to restructure the subsidiaries so that a higher proportion of group profits could be made in tax havens, such as Bermuda. In 1989, 25 percent of profits were attributed to tax haven companies; in 1990 the proportion was 54.5 percent, and News Corporation’s effective tax rate was 1.76 percent rather than the statutory 39 percent.

The merger of Sky Television with its smaller rival, BSB, in November 1990 did nothing to stem the continuing losses from satellite television, since it meant that BSB’s £380 million loan facility was withdrawn. It also turned out that neither company had consulted the Independent Broadcasting Authority, which licensed BSB’s operations, and had thus breached the contract. Once again, as with ATV 10 in Melbourne, Murdoch presented the regulatory body with a fait accompli. By mid-1991 Sky, now renamed BSkyB, had swallowed up £1.5 billion in investments from various shareholders, among whom News Corporation was the largest, with a 49 percent stake.

Between August and December 1990 the value of News Corporation shares fell by two-thirds. News Corporation’s debts, to 146 banks, stood at more than US$8.2 billion, and Murdoch had to promise to repay US$1.2 billion by June 1992.

In 1990 Murdoch began a well-planned, controlled restructuring of News Corporation’s massive debt. After months of foot-dragging, his banks arranged a refinancing package dubbed “Project Dolphin” that called for US$7.6 billion to be repaid by 1994. In return, the interest rate on the debts was raised by a full percentage point, and Murdoch agreed to a fire sale on many of his recent acquisitions. Between February 1991 and February 1992, Murdoch parted with $800 million worth of businesses, including most of News Corporation’s United States magazines—New Woman, New York, and Premier —and equity in recently acquired Group Zeta. In the process, Murdoch’s equity in News Corp has been reduced to about 30 percent, thereby reducing his volatile influence on the company but retaining his marketing savvy.

As News Corporation’s stock price rose, it sold $180 million of convertible preference shares (a type of equity) to three American companies, then divested itself of 55 percent of its Australian printing and magazine businesses. The resulting new company, called Pacific Magazines and Printing, took A$300 million in debt from News Corp’s balance sheet and raised A$382 million from investors via a rights issue.

By the end of 1991, Murdoch had won back the confidence of his banks. They agreed to extend News Corp’s repayment schedule by three years, allowing him to carry $3 billion of debt that had been due in February 1994 until 1997. The banks also permitted News Corp to pay some dividends and keep some of the proceeds of its asset sales.

Against all odds, and to the surprise of many observers, Murdoch and News Corporation not only survived the largest restructuring outside bankruptcy court in history, but went on to reach new highs in the early 1990s. By third quarter 1991, News Corporation’s net profits had skyrocketed to A$107.5 million ($84.3 million). The 315-percent increase from the previous year may have salved the pain of Murdoch’s divestment from the magazine business.

Although News Corp’s British and Australian tabloids continue to bring in steady profits, Murdoch has turned his attention almost exclusively to movies and television, having sold nearly all the company’s American newspapers and magazines except TV Guide. News Corp’s Fox network has topped ratings charts with shows such as The Simpsons and Beverly Hills 90210, Twentieth Century Fox’s Home Alone became one of the most popular movies in history, and even BSkyB began to show promise. By the end of 1992, BSkyB had subscriptions of 3.4 million households in Great Britain and Ireland, amounting to approximately 19 percent of the total population of the United Kingdom.

Although Murdoch was discouraged from going on another acquisitions spree, he did forge an alliance with French TV giant Canal Plus to develop pay television services throughout Europe. With only six percent of West European homes equipped with cable, the market for pay-TV is regarded as a largely untapped one. Analysts predict that News Corp/Canal Plus will be a formidable opponent in the battle for subscribers.

News Corporation’s enormous commercial weight, coupled with its accompanying social influence, have made both the group and Murdoch, its chief executive, the subject of significant controversy. This is usually presented in personalized terms. For example, there are several biographies of Murdoch available, but no history of the group as such. This approach tends to distort the allocation of responsibility for the activities of a group that its admirers regard as a great achievement and its detractors as a dangerous concentration of power.

Principal Subsidiaries

News Ltd.; Nationwide News Pty Ltd.; The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd.; News International plc (U.K.); News Group Newspapers Ltd. (U.K.); Times Newspapers Holdings Ltd. (U.K.); British Sky Broadcasting pic (U.K., 50%); South China Morning Post (Holdings) Ltd. (Hong Kong, 51%); HarperCollins U.S. Inc.; HarperCollins (UK) Ltd.; News Publishing Australia Ltd. (U.S.A.); News America Publishing Inc. (U.S.A.); Fox Inc. (U.S.A.); Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation (U.S.A.); Access Securities Pty Ltd.; News Publishers Holdings Pty Ltd.; New U.S. Holding Pty Ltd.; News Securities B.V. (Netherlands); Newscorp Investments Ltd. (U.K.); Newscorp Securities Ltd.; The News Investments (Australia); News Publishing Australia Ltd. (U.S.A.); New Guinea Courier Pty Ltd. (62.5%); News Data Security Products Ltd. (60%); News Datacom Research Ltd. (60%); Post Courier Ltd. (62%); Rabaul Times Pty Ltd. (62.5%); Sky Radio Ltd. (51%); South Pacific Post Pty Ltd. (62.5%); South China Morning Post (Holdings) Ltd. (51%); Spectak Productions Pty Ltd. (51%).

News Corporation Limited

views updated May 11 2018

News Corporation Limited

2 Holt Street
Sydney, New South Wales 2010
Australia
(02) 288 3000
Fax: (02) 288 3424

Public Company
Incorporated: 1979
Employees: 28,000
Sales: A$8.76 billion (US$6.77 billion)
Stock Exchanges: Amsterdam Australia Hong Kong London New York New Zealand Paris Tokyo

News Corporation is the holding company for the range of enterprises created or acquired since the 1950s by the Australian-American businessman Rupert Murdoch. It is the largest publisher of English-language newspapers in the world, and its subsidiaries include HarperCollins Publishers, the world’s largest publisher of English-language books, as well as television stations, film production companies, printing firms, and airlines.

Rupert Murdoch was born in Melbourne in 1931, the son of Sir Keith Murdoch, managing director of the Herald and Weekly Times newspaper group. Sir Keith did not own many shares in the group, but was the major shareholder in News Ltd., which published the Adelaide News and Sunday Mail, and in a Brisbane company whose two newspapers he amalgamated into one, the Courier-Mail.

Sir Keith died in 1952. After graduating that year, his son spent some months as a junior sub-editor at the London Daily Express and returned to Australia in 1953 to take over the Adelaide papers. His father’s executors sold the Courier-Mail to the Herald and Weekly Times group. In 1956 News Ltd. acquired the Perth Sunday Times; in 1957 it launched TV Week— inspired by the American TV Guide— which was to be the most profitable of all its Australian publications; in 1958 control of Channel 9, one of two TV channels in Adelaide, was awarded to Southern Television Corporation, in which News Ltd. had 60% of the shares. Murdoch’s empire-building had begun.

The year 1960 was a watershed. News Ltd. bought Cumberland Newspapers, a group of local papers in the Sydney suburbs, then acquired the Sydney Daily and Sunday Mirror from the Fairfax group. Rohan Rivett, the editor of the Adelaide News, became the first of many editors to be fired from Murdoch newspapers. Five weeks before his dismissal he had been celebrating his acquittal on charges of seditious libel. These had arisen out of the News’s criticisms of a state government inquiry into the case of an Aborigine found guilty of a murder which Rivett, and Murdoch, thought he had not committed. His departure marked the end of Murdoch’s leanings toward anti-establishment views.

In 1964 News Ltd. launched The Australian, Australia’s first national newspaper, based in Canberra. Murdoch considered it prestigious enough to be worth losing A$30 million, in 20 years, to keep going. Typesetting in Canberra and flying the matrices to Melbourne and Sydney for printing were difficult, and in 1967 the paper was moved to Sydney. In 1969, its latest editor oversaw its re-adoption of opposition to the Vietnam War, a policy the paper had espoused in 1965, when Australian troops first went there, but had since abandoned.

Murdoch, meanwhile, was in London. In October 1968 Robert Maxwell had offered to buy the United Kingdom’s News of the World Organization (NOTW) for £26 million. The company owned the Sunday newspaper the News of the World, the Bemrose group of local newspapers, the papermak-ers Townsend Hook, and several other publishing companies. It had been run since 1891 by the Carr family, which had now split into two factions, one led by NOTW’s chairman, Sir William Carr, with 32% of the shares, the other by his cousin, Derek Jackson, whose decision to sell his 25g% stake had precipitated the crisis. Maxwell, born in Czechoslovakia, was then a Labour member of Parliament and the combination of his foreign origin and his political opinions provoked a hostile response to his bid from the Carrs and from the editor of the News of the World, Stafford Somerfield, who declared that the paper was—and should remain—as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. News Ltd. arranged to swap shares in some of its minor ventures with the Carrs and by December it controlled 40% of the NOTW stock. In January 1969 Maxwell’s bid was rejected at a shareholders’ meeting where half of those present were company staff, temporarily given voting shares. Illness removed Sir William Carr from the chairmanship in June 1969: Murdoch succeeded him. In 1977, just before his death, Carr wrote to Maxwell to express regret that he had spurned his original offer for NOTW. In 1990 the News of the World was the biggest-selling English-language newspaper in the world.

Murdoch next sought a British daily to accompany the News of the World. He found it in 1969, when IPC decided to sell off The Sun, which had been launched in 1964 but had never been profitable, with sales of about one million copies. Under Murdoch, by contrast, The Sun’s circulation reached two million in 1971 and three million in 1973.

NOTW had added television to its list of interests in 1969, when it bought 8% of the voting shares in London Weekend Television (LWT), a company created in 1968 to run commercial television from Friday evening to Sunday night in a large and lucrative region centered on the capital city. The holding was rapidly built up to 36% of the voting shares and Murdoch became a non-executive director of LWT. He promptly saw to the dismissal of its managing director and took the chair of the executive committee in charge of scheduling, thus running the station without having been awarded a franchise. The Independent Television Authority ordered LWT to put its affairs in order without Murdoch in charge. The controversy over this incident was revived in 1977, when the government-appointed Committee on the Future of Broadcasting made some severe criticisms of the authority’s failure to enforce its own rules. By that time, however, Murdoch had moved to the United States, and NOTW’s shares in LWT were sold in 1980.

Back in Australia, Murdoch found that The Australian had become too liberal for his liking. In 1971 he dismissed its editor, Adrian Deamer, after he had been in the post for three years—a remarkable record, considering that the paper would have 13 editors in its first 16 years. In 1972 News Ltd. bought the Sydney Daily and Sunday Telegraph from Packer’s Consolidated Press, which had been losing circulation to the three Fairfax papers, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun, and the Sunday Sun-Herald. The ailing Sunday Australian was absorbed into the Sunday Telegraph soon afterward.

Murdoch had become close to Gough Whitlam, then leader of the Australian Labor Party, and gave A$75,000 to the party’s advertising campaign in 1972. If this was a return to Murdoch’s earlier radicalism, it was short-lived. Within three years his papers were attacking the Labor Party again, with The Australian, for example, using raw figures, rather than seasonally-adjusted ones, to suggest, wrongly, that unemployment was rising. After the 1975 election, in which Whitlam was defeated, Murdoch himself, using a “special correspondent” by-line, wrote a report for The Australian on the Labor Party’s secret—and eventually fruitless—appeal to Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, for financial aid, which resulted in a meeting in Sydney between Whitlam and Saddam’s nephew. Ironically, what appeared to be just more anti-Whitlam propaganda was perfectly true.

In 1973 the News group made its first American acquisition, three newspapers in San Antonio, Texas, one of which, the San Antonio News, achieved brief but worldwide notoriety in 1976, with the striking but inaccurate headline “Killer Bees Move North.” The next American acquisition, in 1976, was the New York Post, the city’s only evening paper. This was swiftly followed, early in 1977, by the purchase of the New York Magazine Company, which published the magazines New York and Village Voice—so swiftly, indeed, that New York’s proposed comment on the Post purchase, a picture of Murdoch as a killer bee, had to be dropped.

Murdoch’s personal supervision of the Post led to an increased circulation, most notably through a series of reports on the “Son of Sam” serial killings, culminating in the misleading headline “How I became a mass killer” over a selection of old and innocuous letters from the murderer to a girlfriend. The Post did especially well in the summer of 1979, when a long-running strike kept its rivals closed, and a separate deal with the unions kept it open. The paper continued to suffer from financial problems, caused partly by the reluctance of the large department stores to advertise in such a down-market publication.

Murdoch did not neglect the Australian sector of his growing empire. In 1978 News Ltd. joined forces with the Packer’s group and the British football pools company Vernons to start a New South Wales lottery and in 1979 it built up a 48.2% stake in Channel TEN-10, a Sydney television station. At the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal hearings into its purchase Murdoch praised the work of its chairman and promised that the station would retain total independence without interference. Two weeks after the tribunal approved the change of ownership, the chief executive was replaced by a News Ltd. director with no television experience; two months later the chairman resigned.

A much bigger acquisition followed, also in 1979, when News Ltd. gained control of ATI, a group of airlines and other transport firms. Its founder, Sir Reginald Ansett, stayed on as chairman of ATI, but Murdoch became chief executive. Murdoch agreed with Sir Peter Abeles, the chairman of another transport group, TNT, that News Ltd. and TNT should have 50-50 ownership of ATI and that Abeles should become joint chief executive. There then followed lengthy public hearings before the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal on whether News Ltd. should be allowed to own a Melbourne television station, the original goal on the ATI/TNT dealings. The tribunal decided against, mainly on the grounds that a Sydney-Melbourne combination under one company would have too big a role in network operations. However, News Ltd. had paid for the station, the statutory six months allowed for ordering divestment had passed, and the tribunal’s decision had no effect. It was eventually reversed on appeal.

The current structure of Rupert Murdoch’s group of companies also dates from 1979 and the creation of News Corporation as the main holding company. In 1990 Murdoch owned only 7,200 shares in News Corporation itself, but had control of Cruden Investments Pty Ltd., which owned more than 116 million shares, about 54% of the total.

In 1981 News International, the British arm of the Murdoch group, acquired 42% of the voting shares in the British publishers William Collins and Sons and bought the London Times, the Sunday Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Times Educational Supplement from what is now The Thomson Corporation. Fifteen years earlier, Lord Thomson’s own purchase of The Times and its supplements had been investigated by the Monopolies Commission, as Lonrho was to be investigated when it made a bid for the London Observer later in 1981. Yet the government of the day waived this requirement in News International’s case.

At the same time as News Corporation’s image was being pushed up-market by these ventures, its down-market newspapers were all engaged in attracting more readers with an adaptation of bingo. In Britain, Sun bingo cards were sent to every household, and rival papers all picked up the game. It then spread to the Sydney Daily Mirror, and to the New York Post, where it had to be renamed Wingo for copyright reasons. The rival Daily News responded with its own version, Zingo. Murdoch has since disposed of the Post, but acquired the Boston Herald— formerly the Herald-American—in 1982 and the Chicago Sun-Times in 1984.

Larry Lamb, the editor of The Sun, and from 1981, his successor Kelvin McKenzie, brought the paper into line with Murdoch’s political views. Thus in 1982 the paper offered enthusiastic support to the British forces in the Falklands War, as almost all the national newspapers did, but characteristically went further, marking the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano with the headline “Gotcha!” and calling the BBC’s defense correspondent and two rival newspapers traitors. The Sun remains the biggest-selling daily newspaper in Britain.

Murdoch’s upmarket papers could be tempted by sensationalism too. In 1983 News Corporation was severely embarrassed by the revelation that the secret diaries of Adolf Hitler, which the Sunday Times planned to serialize under an arrangement with the German magazine Stern, were forgeries. Lord Dacre, better known as the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, and one of the “national” non-executive directors of Times Newspapers, first declared that the samples he had seen were genuine, then told the editor of the Sunday Times that they were forgeries just as the printing of the world exclusive story began. Murdoch decided to go ahead with the printing; Stern had to return the money he had paid for the diaries, and the Sunday Times actually retained some of the extra readers the story had attracted to it.

The appointment of Andrew Neil as editor of the Sunday Times, later in 1983, negated the guarantees exacted from News International by the British government two years before, since the required consultation with the newspaper’s staff did not take place. In the case of Harold Evans, who reluctantly resigned from the editorship of The Times in 1982, at Murdoch’s request, Evans could have appealed over Murdoch’s head to the “national” directors but chose not to do so, leaving the guarantees untested.

News Corporation first ventured into satellite television in 1983, acquiring majority holdings in Satellite Television PLC (SATV), which had been set up in 1980 to supply a U.K.-based service to northern Europe, and in the Inter-American Satellite Television Network, which was renamed Skyband Inc. and had its head office moved from California to New York. It was largely to gain access to a supply of feature films and television programs that News Corporation bought into the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, also in 1983. Twentieth Century Fox has since become a wholly owned subsidiary. Within two years, with the News International papers all featuring articles attacking the BBC, SATV, renamed Sky Channel, had about three million subscribers in 11 European countries and was available in Britain on cable.

During 1985 Murdoch and his closest advisers planned the removal of all the News International papers from the Fleet Street area, the traditional base for national newspapers, to a plant at Wapping, in east London, where troubled relations with the print unions could be superseded by a single union agreement with the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union (EETPU). Electronic typesetting equipment was ordered, but kept hidden from the print workers; the EETPU recruited new production staff, and then, when the plant was ready, the journalists on the four newspapers were given from one to three days to move or to leave the company and the plant began producing papers in January 1986. It was not only the 5,500 sacked print workers who felt somewhat betrayed after this dramatic move. The EETPU never did get a single union agreement, and News International does not recognize any trade unions. In 1987 the British company acquired a fifth newspaper, Today, from the company Lonrho—which had bought out the newspaper’s founder, Eddy Shah—soon after its launch in 1986.

While 1986 was a year of triumph for Murdoch in Britain, in Australia it was a year of retreat. News Ltd. sold off both Channel TEN-10 in Sydney and ATV 10 in Melbourne, as well as radio stations, a record company, and three newspapers. However, 1987 was the year of the acquisition of the Herald and Weekly Times group once run by Murdoch’s father. Shortly before the deal went ahead, Murdoch had a private meeting with the prime minister, Bob Hawke, and the treasurer, Paul Keating, and his Australian newspapers all switched political allegiance to Labor, the governing party. The purchase cost A$2.3 billion, was the biggest single takeover of newspapers ever accomplished, and made News Corporation the largest publisher of English-language newspapers in the world. Shortly afterwards the chairman of the Australian Press Council resigned in protest at the government’s failure to invoke the Foreign Takeovers Act against Murdoch, for by this time Murdoch had become an American citizen. It was not until 1989 that newly-released government documents revealed that the Foreign Investment Review Board had opposed the acquisition, although Prime Minister Hawke declared that it had not.

News Corporation ended 1987 with two more purchases, the South China Morning Post, the most important English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, and the American publishing house Harper & Row. It then sold 50% of Harper & Row to William Collins and Sons. This arrangement lasted only until April 1989, when News International bought Collins outright. HarperCollins Publishers, created as a merger of these and other book and map publishers, is now the largest English-language publisher in the world.

In 1988, three decades after he had borrowed its format for his own TV Week, Murdoch bought the American magazine TV Guide and the company that published it, Triangle Publications, for $2.83 billion. Fox Broadcasting Company started up during the same year as the first new television network in the United States to challenge the long-established trio of ABC, CBS, and NBC. Its huge initial costs were reduced, fortuitously, when the Hollywood writers’ strike allowed it to run a large number of repeats, and it broadcast at first only on Saturdays and Sundays.

February 1989 saw the launch of Sky Television in the United Kingdom as a four-channel service available at first only on cable but increasingly via satellite receiver dishes. By the summer of 1990 it was reaching 1.6 million households, but the losses incurred in its development were a major cause of declining profits for News Corporation, along with the eight-month-long airline pilots’ strike in Australia. It was claimed that profits would have been higher than in the financial year 1988-1989 if these two factors were excluded. Profits were also being eroded by the rising cost of interest payments on the group’s rising level of debts.

Murdoch had once said that he never gave anyone shares but just borrowed to finance expansion. The next year or two revealed the disadvantages of that policy, as the sale of his Australian book publishing and distribution companies in June 1989 proved to be the start of a trend, though revenue and profits from most of News Corporation’s subsidiaries continued to grow. In 1990 it sold 49% of South China Morning Post (Holdings) Ltd., parts of its minority holdings in the news agency Reuters and in the publishers Pearson plc, the American publishing firm J.B. Lippincott, the British papermaker Townsend Hook, the Fox subsidiary DeLuxe Laboratories and the American magazines Star and Sportswear International. Its acquisitions that year—25% of the Spanish publishers Grupo Zeta; the whole of F.F. Publishing and Broadsystem Ltd. in Britain; and 50% holdings, with Hungarian partners, in two publishing companies, Mai Nap Rt and Reform Rt— were relatively minor.

One way around the group’s increasing financial problems was to juggle the figures in News Corporation’s annual reports.

For example, the 1988 losses by News Ltd., the Australian division of the group, were shown as A$202 million in the 1989 report but as A$83 million in 1990, although the overall impact on group profits was said to be the same in both reports. Another way was to restructure the subsidiaries so that a higher proportion of group profits could be made in tax havens, such as Bermuda. In 1989, 25% of profits were attributed to tax haven companies; in 1990 the proportion was 54.5%, and News Corporation’s effective tax rate was 1.76% rather than the statutory 39%.

The merger of Sky Television with its smaller rival, BSB, in November 1990, did nothing to stem the continuing losses from satellite television, since it meant that BSB’s £380 million loan facility was withdrawn. It also turned out that neither company had consulted the Independent Broadcasting Authority, which licensed BSB’s operations, and had thus breached the contract. Once again, as with ATV 10 in Melbourne, Murdoch presented the regulatory body with a fait accompli. By mid-1991 Sky, now renamed BSkyB, had swallowed up £1.5 billion in investments from various shareholders, among whom News Corporation was the largest, with a 49% stake.

Between August and December 1990 the value of News Corporation shares fell by two-thirds. News Corporation’s debts, to 146 banks, stood at more than US$8.2 billion, and Murdoch had to promise to repay US$1.2 billion by June 1992. In return the banks arranged a US$7.4 billion refinancing package, to be repaid by 1994. In 1991 asset sales would have included News Corporation’s half of the satellite television channel Eurosport, if it had not closed down in the meantime, and did in fact include the stake in Grupo Zeta bought only a year before and most of the group’s U.S. magazines, such as New Woman, New York, and Premiere. Since television and publishing are clearly News Corporation’s core businesses, it is difficult to square these divestments with the group’s announcement, in February 1991, that any sales of assets would be concentrated in non-core areas.

News Corporation’s amassing of enormous commercial weight, and its accompanying social influence have made both the group and Murdoch, its chief executive, the subject of controversy everywhere it operates. This is usually presented in personalized terms. For example, there are several biographies of Murdoch available, but no history of the group as such. This approach tends to distort the allocation of responsibility for the activities of a group which its admirers regard as a great achievement and its detractors as a dangerous concentration of power. News Corporation would not exist in its present form without the compliance of politicians and of the former owners of its acquisitions, the forbearance of regulatory authorities, the financial support of numerous banks and—it should not be forgotten—the work of editors, journalists, and other employees.

Principal Subsidiaries

News Ltd.; Nationwide News Pty Ltd.; The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd.; News International pic (U.K.); News Group Newspapers Ltd. (U.K.); Times Newspapers Holdings Ltd. (U.K.); British Sky Broadcasting pic (U.K., 50%); South China Morning Post (Holdings) Ltd. (Hong Kong, 51%); HarperCollins U.S. Inc.; HarperCollins (UK) Ltd.; News Publishing Australia Ltd. (U.S.A.); News America Publishing Inc. (U.S.A.); Fox Inc. (U.S.A.); Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation (U.S.A.).

News Corporation Limited

views updated May 14 2018

News Corporation Limited

2 Holt Street
Sydney, New South Wales 2010
Australia
Telephone: (02) 9288-3000
Fax: (02) 9288-3292
Web site: http://www.newscorp.com

Public Company
Incorporated: 1979
Employees: 31,400
Sales: A$25.5 billion ($13.8 billion) (2001)
Stock Exchanges: Australia London New York New Zealand
Ticker Symbol: NWS
NAIC: 51111 Newspaper Publishers; 51113 Book Publishers; 51223 Music Publishers; 51312 Television Broadcasting; 51321 Cable Networks; 51211 Motion Picture and Video Production

News Corporation Limited is the holding company for the large range of enterprises created or acquired since the 1950s by the Australian-American businessman Rupert Murdoch. It operates as one of the five largest media conglomerates in the world with assets totaling $43 billion in 2001. The company’s holdings include businesses involved in filmed entertainment, television, satellite and cable network programming, newspapers, magazines, book publishing, music, digital television technology, and online programming. News Corp. also owns 85 percent of the Fox Entertainment Group, 40 percent of the STAPLES Center—the home of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team and the Los Angeles Kings ice hockey team—and major league baseball team the Los Angeles Dodgers. Nearly 75 percent of the firm’s revenues stem from its U.S. operations, while Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, Latin America, and the Pacific Basin region account for the remaining 25 percent.

Beginnings of News Coporation

Rupert Murdoch was born in Melbourne in 1931, the son of Sir Keith Murdoch, managing director of the Herald and Weekly Times newspaper group. Sir Keith did not own many shares in the group, but was the major shareholder in News Ltd., which published the Adelaide News and Sunday Mail, and in a Brisbane company whose two newspapers he amalgamated into one, the Courier-Mail.

Sir Keith died in 1952. After graduating that year, his son spent some months as a junior subeditor at the London Daily Express and returned to Australia in 1953 to take over the Adelaide newspapers. His father’s executors sold the Courier-Mail to the Herald and Weekly Times group. In 1956, News Ltd. acquired the Perth Sunday Times; in 1957, it launched TV Week —inspired by the American TV Guide —which was to be the most profitable of all its Australian publications. In 1958, control of Channel 9, one of two TV channels in Adelaide, was awarded to Southern Television Corporation, in which News Ltd. had 60 percent of the shares. Murdoch’s empire-building had begun.

The Building of an Empire: 1960s–1970s

The year 1960 was a watershed for News Ltd. It bought Cumberland Newspapers, a group of local papers in the Sydney suburbs, then acquired the Sydney Daily and Sunday Mirror from the Fairfax group. Rohan Rivett, the editor of the Adelaide News, became the first of many editors to be fired from Murdoch newspapers. Five weeks before his dismissal he had been celebrating his acquittal on charges of seditious libel. These had arisen out of the News’ criticisms of a state government inquiry into the case of an Aborigine found guilty of a murder that Rivett, and Murdoch, thought he had not committed. His departure marked the end of Murdoch’s leanings toward anti-establishment views.

In 1964, News Ltd. launched The Australian, Australia’s first national newspaper, based in Canberra. Murdoch considered the venture prestigious enough to be worth a loss of A$30 million, over the course of 20 years, to keep going. Typesetting in Canberra and flying the matrices to Melbourne and Sydney for printing were difficult, and in 1967 the paper was moved to Sydney. In 1969, its latest editor oversaw its re-adoption of opposition to the Vietnam War, a return to the stance first espoused by the paper in 1965 when Australian troops were initially assigned there.

Murdoch, meanwhile, was in London. In October 1968, Robert Maxwell had offered to buy the United Kingdom’s News of the World Organization (NOTW) for £26 million. The company owned the Sunday newspaper News of the World, the Bemrose group of local newspapers, the papermaker Townsend Hook, and several other publishing companies. It had been run since 1891 by the Carr family, which had now split into two factions, one led by NOTW’s chairman, Sir William Carr, with 32 percent of the shares, the other by his cousin, Derek Jackson, whose decision to sell his 25 percent stake had precipitated the crisis. Maxwell, born in Czechoslovakia, was then a Labour member of Parliament. Maxwell’s foreign origin, combined with his political opinions, provoked a hostile response to his bid from the Carrs and from the editor of the News of the World, Stafford Somerfield, who declared that the paper was—and should remain—as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. News Ltd. arranged to swap shares in some of its minor ventures with the Carrs and by December it controlled 40 percent of the NOTW’stock. In January 1969, Maxwell’s bid was rejected at a shareholders’ meeting where half of those present were company staff, temporarily given voting shares. Illness removed Sir William Carr from the chairmanship in June 1969, and Murdoch succeeded him. In 1977, just before his death, Carr wrote to Maxwell to express regret that he had spurned his original offer for NOTW. The News of the World remained the biggest-selling English-language newspaper in the world.

Murdoch next sought a British daily to accompany the News of the World. He found it in 1969, when IPC decided to sell off The Sun, which had been launched in 1964 but had never been profitable, with sales of about one million copies. Under Murdoch, by contrast, The Sun’s circulation reached two million in 1971 and three million in 1973.

NOTW had added television to its list of interests in 1969, when it bought eight percent of the voting shares in London Weekend Television (LWT), a company created in 1968 to run commercial television from Friday evening to Sunday night in a large and lucrative region centered on the capital city. The holding was rapidly built up to 36 percent of the voting shares and Murdoch became a non-executive director of LWT. He promptly saw to the dismissal of its managing director and took the chair of the executive committee in charge of scheduling, thus running the station without having been awarded a franchise. The Independent Television Authority ordered LWT to put its affairs in order without Murdoch in charge. The controversy over this incident was revived in 1977 when the government-appointed Committee on the Future of Broadcasting made severe criticisms of the authority’s failure to enforce its own rules. By that time, however, Murdoch had moved to the United States, and NOTW’s shares in LWT were sold in 1980.

Back in Australia, Murdoch found that The Australian had become too liberal for his liking. In 1971, he dismissed its editor, Adrian Deamer, who had been in the post for three years—a remarkable record, considering that the paper would have 13 editors in its first 16 years. In 1972, News Ltd. bought the Sydney Daily and Sunday Telegraph from Packer’s Consolidated Press, which had been losing circulation to the three Fairfax papers, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun, and the Sunday Sun-Herald. The ailing Sunday Australian was absorbed into the Sunday Telegraph soon afterward.

Murdoch had become close to Gough Whitlam, then leader of the Australian Labor Party, and gave A$75,000 to the party’s advertising campaign in 1972. If this was a return to Murdoch’s earlier radicalism, it was short-lived. Within three years his papers were attacking the Labor Party again, with The Australian, for example, using raw figures, rather than seasonally adjusted ones, to suggest, wrongly, that unemployment was rising. After the 1975 election, in which Whitlam was defeated, Murdoch himself, using a “special correspondent” byline, wrote a report for The Australian on the Labor Party’s secret—and eventually fruitless—appeal to Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, for financial aid, which resulted in a meeting in Sydney between Whitlam and Saddam’s nephew. Ironically, what appeared to be just more anti-Whitlam propaganda was true.

In 1973, the News group made its first American acquisitions, purchasing three newspapers in San Antonio, Texas. One of these, the San Antonio News, achieved brief but worldwide notoriety in 1976 with the striking but inaccurate headline “Killer Bees Move North.” The next American acquisition, in 1976, was the New York Post, the city’s only evening paper. This was swiftly followed, early in 1977, by the purchase of the New York Magazine Company, which published the magazines New York and Village Voice. The acquisitions were, in fact, accomplished so quickly that New York’ s proposed comment on the Post purchase, a picture of Murdoch as a killer bee, had to be dropped.

Murdoch’s personal supervision of the Post led to an increased circulation, most notably through a series of reports on the “Son of Sam” serial killings, culminating in the misleading headline “How I Became a Mass Killer” over a selection of old and innocuous letters from the murderer to a girlfriend. The Post did especially well in the summer of 1979 when, armed with separate agreements with the unions, a long-running strike kept its rivals closed. The paper continued to suffer from financial problems, caused partly by the reluctance of the large department stores to advertise in such a down-market publication.

Murdoch did not neglect the Australian sector of his growing empire. In 1978, News Ltd. joined forces with the Packer’s group and the British football pools company Vernons to start a New South Wales lottery. In 1979, it built up a 48.2 percent stake in Channel TEN-10, a Sydney television station. At the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal hearings into its purchase, Murdoch praised the work of its chairman and promised that the station would retain total independence without interference. Two weeks after the tribunal approved the change of ownership, the chief executive was replaced by a News Ltd. director with no television experience; two months later the chairman resigned.

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A much bigger acquisition followed, also in 1979, when News Ltd. gained control of ATI, a group of airlines and other transport firms. Its founder, Sir Reginald Ansett, stayed on as chairman of ATI, but Murdoch became chief executive. Murdoch agreed with Sir Peter Abeles, the chairman of the TNT transport group, that News Ltd. and TNT should have 50-50 ownership of ATI and that Abeles should become joint chief executive. There then followed lengthy public hearings before the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal on whether or not News Ltd. should be allowed to own a Melbourne television station, the original goal of the ATI/TNT dealings. The tribunal decided against granting approval, mainly on the grounds that a Sydney-Melbourne combination under one company would have too big a role in network operations. By the time of the ruling, however, News Ltd. had paid for the station and the statutory six months allowed for ordering divestment had passed; the tribunal’s decision had no effect. The ruling was eventually reversed on appeal.

The current structure of Rupert Murdoch’s group of companies also dates from the creation of News Corp. as the main holding company in 1979. In 1990, Murdoch owned only 7,200 shares in News Corp. itself, but he also had control of Cruden Investments Pty Ltd., which owned more than 116 million shares, about 54 percent of the total. In 2001, the Murdoch family controlled nearly 30 percent of the firm.

Focus on Publishing: Early 1980s

In 1981, News International, the British arm of the Murdoch group, acquired 42 percent of the voting shares in the British publishers William Collins and Sons and bought the London Times, the Sunday Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Times Educational Supplement from what is now The Thomson Corporation. Fifteen years earlier, Lord Thomson’s own purchase of The Times and its supplements had been investigated by the Monopolies Commission, as Lonrho was to be investigated when it made a bid for the London Observer later in 1981. Yet the government of the day waived this requirement in News International’s case.

At the same time as News Corp.’s image was being pushed up-market by these ventures, its down-market newspapers were all engaged in attracting more readers with an adaptation of bingo. In Britain, Sun bingo cards were sent to every household, and rival papers all picked up the game. It then spread to the Sydney Daily Mirror and to the New York Post, where it had to be renamed Wingo for copyright reasons. The rival Daily News responded with its own version, Zingo. Murdoch then went on to acquire the Boston Herald —formerly the Herald-American —in 1982 and the Chicago Sun-Times in 1984.

The Sun’s editors Larry Lamb and, from 1981, his successor Kelvin McKenzie, brought the paper into line with Murdoch’s political views. Thus in 1982, the paper offered enthusiastic support to the British forces in the Falklands War (as almost all the national newspapers did), but characteristically went further, marking the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano with the headline “Gotcha!” and calling the BBC’s defense correspondent and two rival newspapers traitors. The Sun remained the biggest-selling daily newspaper in the U.K. in 2001 with nearly four million more readers each issue than its nearest competitor.

Murdoch’s up-market papers could be tempted by sensationalism as well. In 1983, News Corp. was severely embarrassed by the revelation that the much-publicized secret diaries of Adolf Hitler, which the Sunday Times planned to serialize under an arrangement with the German magazine Stern, were forgeries. Lord Dacre, better known as the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who served as one of the “national” nonexecutive directors of Times Newspapers, first declared that the samples he had seen were genuine, then told the editor of the Sunday Times that they were forgeries just as the printing of the world exclusive story began. Murdoch decided to go ahead with the printing; Stern had to return the money it had paid for the diaries, and the Sunday Times actually retained some of the extra readers the story had attracted to it.

The appointment of Andrew Neil as editor of the Sunday Times later in 1983 negated the guarantees exacted from News International by the British government two years before, since the required consultation with the newspaper’s staff did not take place. Harold Evans had reluctantly resigned from the editorship of the Times in 1982, at Murdoch’s request. Evans could have appealed over Murdoch’s head to the “national” directors but chose not to do so, leaving the guarantees untested.

Key Dates:

1953:: Rupert Murdoch takes over his father’s business.
1957:: News Ltd. launches TV Week.
1960:: Cumberland Newspapers, the Sydney Daily, and the Sunday Mirror are acquired.
1964:: The firm establishes Australia’s first national newspaper, The Australian.
1969:: Murdoch acquires The Sun, a British daily.
1973:: News Ltd. enters the U.S. market with the purchase of three newspapers based in Texas.
1976:: The firm buys the New York Post.
1979:: News Corp. is reorganized as a holding company.
1981:: The London Times, the Sunday Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Times Educational Supplement are purchased.
1983:: News Corp. gains majority interest in Satellite Television PLC and purchases a stake in Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
1984:: The Chicago Sun-Times is acquired.
1988:: Murdoch acquires TV Guide and Triangle Publications; Fox Broadcasting Company begins operation.
1989:: Sky Television is launched in the United Kingdom.
1990:: Faltering under a huge debt load, News Corp. begins restructuring efforts.
1998:: Murdoch sells TV Guide and offers 18.6 percent of the Fox Entertainment Group to the public.
1999:: News Corp. gains full control of Fox/Liberty Networks by acquiring Liberty Media’s 50 percent interest.
2001:: Fox Family Worldwide Inc. is sold; Chris-Craft Industries is purchased for $4.4 billion.

Diversifying Into Satellite Television: 1983

News Corp. first ventured into satellite television in 1983. It acquired majority holdings in Satellite Television PLC (SATV), which had been set up in 1980 to supply a U.K.-based service to northern Europe, and in the Inter-American Satellite Television Network, which was renamed Skyband Inc. and had its head office moved from California to New York. It was largely to gain access to a supply of feature films and television programs that News Corp. bought into the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation also in 1983. Within two years, with the News International papers all featuring articles attacking the BBC, SATV, renamed Sky Channel, had about three million subscribers in 11 European countries and was available in Britain on cable.

During 1985, Murdoch and his closest advisers planned the removal of all the News International papers from the Fleet Street area, the traditional base for national newspapers, to a plant at Wapping, in east London, where troubled relations with the print unions could be superseded by a single union agreement with the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union (EETPU). Electronic typesetting equipment was ordered, but kept hidden from the print workers; the EETPU recruited new production staff, and then, when the plant was ready, the journalists on the four newspapers were given from one to three days to move or to leave the company and the plant began producing papers in January 1986. It was not only the 5,500 sacked print workers who felt somewhat betrayed after this dramatic move. The EETPU never did get a single union agreement, and News International did not recognize any trade unions. In 1987 the British company acquired a fifth newspaper, Today, from the company Lonrho—which had bought out the newspaper’s founder, Eddy Shah—soon after its launch in 1986.

Growth Through Acquisition: Late 1980s

While 1986 was a year of triumph for Murdoch in Britain, in Australia it was a year of retreat. News Ltd. sold off both Channel TEN-10 in Sydney and ATV 10 in Melbourne, as well as radio stations, a record company, and three newspapers. However, 1987 was the year of the acquisition of the Herald and Weekly Times group once run by Murdoch’s father. Shortly before the deal went ahead, Murdoch had a private meeting with the prime minister, Bob Hawke, and the treasurer, Paul Keating, and his Australian newspapers all switched political allegiance to Labor, the governing party. The purchase of the Herald and Weekly Times group cost A$2.3 billion, was the biggest single takeover of newspapers ever accomplished, and made News Corp. the largest publisher of English-language newspapers in the world. Shortly afterward the chairman of the Australian Press Council resigned in protest at the government’s failure to invoke the Foreign Takeovers Act against Murdoch, for by this time Murdoch had become an American citizen. It was not until 1989 that newly released government documents revealed that the Foreign Investment Review Board had opposed the acquisition, although Prime Minister Hawke declared that it had not.

News Corp. ended 1987 with two more purchases, the South China Morning Post, the most important English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, and the American publishing house Harper & Row. It then sold 50 percent of Harper & Row to William Collins and Sons. This arrangement lasted only until April 1989, when News International bought Collins outright. HarperCollins Publishers, created as a merger of these and other book and map publishers, is now the largest English-language publisher in the world.

In 1988, three decades after he had borrowed its format for his own publication on television, Murdoch bought the American magazine TV Guide and the company that published it, Triangle Publications, for $2.83 billion. Fox Broadcasting Company started up during the same year as the first new television network in the United States to challenge the long-established trio of ABC, CBS, and NBC. Its huge initial costs were reduced, fortuitously, when a Hollywood writers’ strike allowed it to run a large number of repeats, and it broadcast at first only on Saturdays and Sundays.

Financial Woes: 1989–1990

In February 1989, Sky Television was launched in the United Kingdom as a four-channel service available at first only on cable but increasingly via satellite receiver dishes. By the summer of 1990, it was reaching 1.6 million households, but the losses incurred in its development were a major cause of declining profits for News Corp., along with the eight-month-long airline pilots’ strike in Australia. It was claimed that profits would have been higher than in the financial year 1988–1989 if these two factors were excluded. Profits were also being eroded by the rising cost of interest payments on the group’s rising level of debts.

Murdoch had once said that he never gave anyone shares but just borrowed to finance expansion. The next year or two revealed the disadvantages of that policy, as the sale of his Australian book publishing and distribution companies in June of 1989 proved to be the start of a trend, though revenue and profits from most of News Corp.’s subsidiaries continued to grow. In 1990, it sold 49 percent of South China Morning Post (Holdings) Ltd., parts of its minority holdings in the news agency Reuters and in the publishers Pearson pic, the American publishing firm J.B. Lippincott, the British papermaker Towns-end Hook, the Fox subsidiary DeLuxe Laboratories and the U.S. magazines Star and Sportswear International. Its acquisitions that year—25 percent of the Spanish publisher Grupo Zeta; the whole of F.F. Publishing and Broadsystem Ltd. in Britain; and 50 percent holdings, with Hungarian partners, in two publishing companies, Mai Nap Rt and Reform Rt—were relatively minor.

One way around the group’s increasing financial problems was to juggle the figures in News Corp.’s annual reports. For example, the 1988 losses by News Ltd., the Australian division of the group, were shown as A$202 million in the 1989 report but as A$83 million in 1990, although the overall impact on group profits was said to be the same in both reports. Another way was to restructure the subsidiaries so that a higher proportion of group profits could be made in tax havens, such as Bermuda. In 1989, 25 percent of profits were attributed to tax haven companies; in 1990 the proportion was 54.5 percent, and News Corp.’s effective tax rate was 1.76 percent rather than the statutory 39 percent.

The merger of Sky Television with its smaller rival, BSB, in November 1990 did nothing to stem the continuing losses from satellite television, since it meant that BSB’s pound 380 million loan facility was withdrawn. It also turned out that neither company had consulted the Independent Broadcasting Authority, which licensed BSB’s operations, and had thus breached the contract. Once again, as with ATV 10 in Melbourne, Murdoch presented the regulatory body with a fait accompli. By mid-1991, Sky, now renamed BSkyB, had swallowed up pounds 1.5 billion in investments from various shareholders, among whom News Corp. was the largest, with a 49 percent stake. Between August and December 1990, the value of News Corp. shares fell by two-thirds. The firm’s debts, to 146 banks, stood at more than $8.2 billion, and Murdoch had to promise to repay $1.2 billion by June 1992.

In 1990, Murdoch began a well-planned, controlled restructuring of News Corp.’s massive debt. After months of foot-dragging, his banks arranged a refinancing package dubbed “Project Dolphin” that called for $7.6 billion to be repaid by 1994. In return, the interest rate on the debts was raised by a full percentage point, and Murdoch agreed to a fire sale on many of his recent acquisitions. Between February 1991 and February 1992, Murdoch parted with $800 million worth of businesses, including most of News Corp.’s United States magazines—New Woman, New York, and Premier —and equity in Group Zeta. In the process, Murdoch’s equity in News Corp. was reduced to about 30 percent, thereby reducing his volatile influence on the company but retaining his marketing savvy.

As News Corp.’s stock price rose, it sold $180 million of convertible preference shares (a type of equity) to three American companies, then divested itself of 55 percent of its Australian printing and magazine businesses. The resulting new company, called Pacific Magazines and Printing, took A$300 million in debt from News Corp.’s balance sheet and raised A$382 million from investors via a rights issue.

By the end of 1991, Murdoch had won back the confidence of his banks. They agreed to extend News Corp.’s repayment schedule by three years, allowing him to carry $3 billion of debt that had been due in February 1994 until 1997. The banks also permitted News Corp. to pay some dividends and keep some of the proceeds of its asset sales.

Success After Financial Restructuring: Early-to-Mid 1990s

Against all odds, and to the surprise of many observers, Murdoch and News Corp. not only survived the largest restructuring outside bankruptcy court in history, but went on to reach new highs in the early 1990s. By third quarter 1991, News Corp.’s net profits had skyrocketed to A$ 107.5 million ($84.3 million). The 315 percent increase from the previous year may have salved the pain of Murdoch’s divestment in the magazine industry.

Although News Corp.’s British and Australian tabloids continued to bring in steady profits, Murdoch turned his attention to movies and television in the early 1990s, having sold nearly all the company’s American newspapers and magazines except TV Guide. During that time, News Corp.’s Fox network topped ratings charts with shows such as The Simpsons and Beverly Hills 90210, Twentieth Century Fox’s Home Alone became one of the most popular movies in history, and even BSkyB began to show promise. By the end of 1992, BSkyB had subscriptions of 3.4 million households in Great Britain and Ireland, amounting to approximately 19 percent of the total population of the United Kingdom.

Although Murdoch was discouraged from going on another acquisitions spree, he did forge an alliance with French TV giant Canal Plus to develop pay television services throughout Europe. With only 6 percent of West European homes equipped with cable, the market for pay-TV was regarded as a largely untapped one and analysts predicted that the News Corp./Canal Plus deal would create a formidable opponent in the battle for subscribers.

News Corp.’s enormous commercial weight, coupled with its accompanying social influence, made both the group and Murdoch, its chief executive, long-time subjects of significant controversy. This is usually presented in personalized terms. For example, while there are several biographies of Murdoch himself available, there is no history of the group as such. This approach often distorted the allocation of responsibility for the activities of a group whose admirers regarded as a great achievement and its detractors as a dangerous concentration of power.

Emerging As a Powerhouse: Mid-to-Late 1990s

Conflict surrounding Murdoch continued into the mid-to-late 1990s, as the media mogul once again began rebuilding his empire—this time focusing on global dominance in the entertainment, television, satellite, and cable network industries. The financial problems of the late 1980s and early 1990s a thing of the past, Murdoch began a whirlwind of activity, first saving the New York Post from financial ruin, then purchasing a majority interest in Star TV, Hong Kong’s satellite network. The broadcasting rights to the National Football League were also purchased.

In late 1996, News Corp. teamed up with Softbank Corp. to create Japan Sky Broadcasting Company Ltd. (JskyB), a digital satellite broadcasting services firm. The company also acquired the remaining shares of New World Broadcasting Group—Fox had originally acquired a 20 percent interest in New World in 1994. That year, News Corp.’s revenues increased by 10 percent over the previous year to $9.9 billion, but operating profits fell by 24 percent.

Murdoch continued making deals despite faltering profits. During 1997, News Corp. completed its purchase of Heritage Media Corp. It also acquired International Family Entertainment Inc. in a $1.9 billion deal. The firm continued to pay close attention to its Fox interest, launching both Fox Sport Americas in Latin America and the Fox News Channel. News Corp. also began satellite ventures in Mexico and Brazil.

Murdoch’s feverish pace continued in the latter half of the 1990s. The professional baseball team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, was purchased for $300 million. In April of 1998, News Corp. also landed the rights to the new series of Star Wars films. Management hoped that the success of the series would keep pace with the highly successful and profit-boosting Titanic film. The company sold its TV Guide to Universal Video Satellite Group for $2 billion and sold 18.6 percent of the Fox Entertainment Group to the public. The IPO raised $2.7 billion. Not all of Murdoch’s acquisition attempts were successful however. The media giant failed to successfully team up with EchoStar Communications Corp., a large concern in the satellite industry.

In 1999, News Corp. purchased Liberty Media Corporation’s 50 percent interest in Fox/Liberty Networks. The firm also bought 224.8 million non-voting shares from MCI WorldCom, worth $1.4 billion. Net profit for the year however, fell by 35 percent over the previous year. Management cited investments in digital technology at BskyB as well as in various other satellite operations as culprits in the falling profits.

Alliances for the New Millennium

News Corp. entered the new millennium with continued focus on its entertainment, satellite, and cable operations. The original foundation of the firm, its newspaper segment, continued to prosper. During 2001, the company made several key moves to better position itself during an economic slowdown in the U.S. During the dot-com fallout of 2000 and 2001, News Corp. was forced to forego several Internet-related ventures. In fact, it ended its $1 billion partnership with WebMD Corp., an Internet-based healthcare services and information provider—WebMD shares had fallen from a high of $75 per share to just $5 per share.

The firm also sold its Fox Family Worldwide Inc. to Walt Disney Company for $5.3 billion in 2001. It also set plans in motion to merge its Italy-based Stream pay television operations with Vivendi Universal. Stream had been losing approximately $360 million per year. Murdoch’s attempts to gain control of a major satellite concern were spoiled once again after negotiations with DirecTV Inc.—owned by General Motors Corp.—fell through.

News Corp. did score a coup however, when it completed the $4.4 billion purchase of Chris-Craft Industries Inc. The deal added 10 new U.S. television stations to the firm’s arsenal. The acquisition, coupled with station trades with ClearChannel Communications Inc. and Viacom International Inc., gave News Corp. duopolies in seven markets including New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Washington, Phoenix, and Minneapolis.

According to a December 2001 AsiaPulse News article, Murdoch addressed concerns related to the faltering American economy in a December staff email stating, “momentous events beginning on September 11—and economic conditions beginning long before that—have forced every News Corp. company to find ways to streamline its operations. I have very little doubt that next year will be another very difficult one—which should make us only more determined to succeed at every level.” This determination and News Corp.’s history of success would no doubt leave it standing as a leading media conglomerate in the years to come.

Principal Subsidiaries

Fox Broadcasting Co. (United States); Fox Television Stations Inc. (United States); Fox Entertainment Group Inc. (United States; 85%); HarperCollins Publishers Inc. (United States).

Principal Operating Units

Filmed Entertainment; Television; Newspapers; Book Publishing; Magazines and Inserts; Cable Network Programming.

Principal Competitors

AOL Time Warner Inc.; Bertelsmann AG; Walt Disney Company.

News Corporation Limited

views updated May 11 2018

News Corporation Limited

founded: 1923 variant name: news corp.

Contact Information:

headquarters: 2 holt street
sydney, n.s.w. 2010 australia phone: 61 (2) 9288 3000 fax: 61 (2) 9288 3292 url: http://www.newscorp.com

OVERVIEW

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation Ltd. is a media presence that extends to nearly every corner of the globe, and into nearly every type of communications medium: film, broadcast, and print. The company is a true conglomerate of corporate divisions, fully and partly owned subsidiaries, and joint ventures. The company is responsible for some of the most successful films and TV shows as well as the some of the world's best-known magazines and newspapers. It is a full or part owner of three iconic U.S. sports franchises, the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, the New York Knicks of the National Basketball Association, and the New York Rangers of the National Hockey League. Although Murdoch became a U.S. citizen in the mid-1980s in order to purchase U.S. TV stations, News Corp. is an Australian firm, headquartered in Sydney.

News Corp. is comprised of seven operating segments. The Filmed Entertainment segment is made up of companies that produce films for theatrical release and programming for television. The segment's centerpiece is the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation which turned out blockbusters like Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and Moulin Rouge. Twentieth Century Fox Television is the only studio creating programming for all six U.S. broadcasting networks, and at the end of 2001 it was responsible for more primetime programming than any other studio. Other studios in the segment include Fox 2000 Pictures, Fox Searchlight Pictures, Fox Television Studios, a group of independently-run production houses, Regency Television, and Blue Sky Studios. The Fox group also includes film studios in Australia and Mexico.

The News Corp. Television segment is made up of the The Fox Broadcasting Company which broadcast hit shows such as The Simpsons, Ally McBeal, and The X-Files. The chain of Fox stations is the foundation of the network—over thirty local stations in almost every major market in the United States; in seven markets News Corp. has two television stations. The company's other global television operations include British Sky Broadcasting, Sky Global Networks, STAR and the Channel [V] Music Networks in Asia, News Broadcasting Japan, Canal Fox in Latin America, and Fox Sports Australia. The firm's third corporate segment, Cable Network Programming, is anchored by the Fox Cable Networks which include FX, the Fox Movie Channel, Fox Sports Networks, the National Geographic Channel and others.

News Corp. purchased the Los Angeles Dodgers, and shares of the New York Knicks and New York Rangers to bolster its cable sports offerings. By 2002 the Fox News Channel was a close second in viewership behind CNN.

News Corp. is well-represented in the print media. Its Magazine & Inserts segment includes Gemstar-TV Guide International, which publishes TV Guide, the most popular magazine in the United States as well as an interactive program guide for cable TV. Other magazines include Weekly Standard, In-Store, the Times Literary Supplement, the Times Educational Supplement, and others in the United States, Canada, Australia and Asia. News Corporation's Newspapers segments publishes the New York Post in the United States, four of the UK's most popular newspapers the Times of London, Sunday Times, Sun, and News of the World in the U.K., and the Australian and scores of other newspapers in Oceania. The Book Publishing segment, which produces books for both adults and children, is anchored by HarperCollins and a long list of imprints including Perennial Books, the Ecco Press, HarperTorch, William Morrow and Avon. News Corp.'s Other segment includes NDS, a producer of digital TV technology, the News Corp. Music Group which is active in Asia and Australia, the Australian National Rugby League, and various software and Internet ventures.

COMPANY FINANCES

News Corp. products are sold the world over. The company finances are reported in Australian dollars, except when it is specified otherwise. The company had $25.58 billion in sales revenues in 2001, up from $22.44 billion the previous year. The United States accounted for 75 percent of the 2001 revenues with $19.1 billion. The United Kingdom brought in 16 percent of the firms' revenues, $4.18 billion in all. Australian and Asian revenues totaled $2.3 billion, 9 percent of the company's total.

FAST FACTS: About News Corporation Limited

Ownership: News Corporation is a publicly owned company traded on the New York, Australian, New Zealand, and London Stock Exchanges.

Ticker Symbol: NWS

Officers: K. Rupert Murdoch, Managing Dir., CEO, and Chmn., 70, 2001 base salary $4,357,000; P. Chernin, Executive Dir., Pres., and COO, 50, 2001 base salary $7,000,000; D.F. DeVoe, CFO and Finance Dir., 54, 2001 base salary $1,675,000

Employees: 30,000

Principal Subsidiary Companies: News Corporation is a multinational media company with offices and subsidiaries in North America, Europe, Australia, Asia and Latin America. Its interests include newspapers, broadcast media, film studios, book publishing, and software development. Particularly noteworthy is its Fox Film Entertainment group which 6 of the top 10 grossing films of all times as of the year 2000. About 30 percent of News Corporation is owned by the family of the company's founder, Rupert Murdoch.

Chief Competitors: Because of its broad media holdings, News Corporation competes with a number of multinational companies in a variety of industries including book and magazine publishing, film production, and cable, satellite and traditional broadcasting. Some primary competitors are AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann, Walt Disney Company, CBS, NBC, Hearst Corporation, and Tribune Company.

News Corp's TV segment led all industries with $7 billion in sales revenue in 2001. Films were a close second with $6.63 billion, followed by Newspapers with $4.6 billion, Cable Network Programming with $2.7 billion, Book Publishing with $1.92 billion, Magazines & Inserts with $1.68 billion, and Other with $1.07 billion. The Fox News Channel reported a profit in 2001, the first in its five year history, while STAR TV boosted its operating income by 24 percent. Thanks to strong video and DVD sales, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment reported its first billion dollar year, with (US) $1 billion in net sales, a clear indication of the firm's importance to News Corp's overall film businesses. News Corp. reported an operating loss in 2001 of $746 million, which translated to a basic loss of $0.10 per share. The loss was in large part the result of a worldwide drop in advertising. The company had had a profit of over $1.2 billion in 2000, and more than doubling its profits between 1997 and 1999. Its stock price in 2001 went as high as (US) $57.50 and as low as (US) $28.63

ANALYSTS' OPINIONS

In 2002, analysts saw News Corporation as the victim of a weak advertising market, which impacted the profitability of its television, newspaper, and magazine businesses. Value Line expected the hard times to continue in advertising and to affect News Corp.'s operations. The analysts believed News Corporation's advertising-dependent units faced challneges in the coming quarters, as did the entire company, which itself depended on those units for a great deal of revenue. At the same time, income from News Corp.'s book, cable TV, and films businesses—those which did not derive their income from advertising sources—remained strong, and helped counterbalance other weaker performers. "News Corp. shares offer moderate appeal," Value Line wrote, noting that the company's diversity exposed it to most trends in the overall economy. "Although results have been down," it concluded, "we feel a pickup in the economy will spawn a solid earnings rebound through 2004-2006."

CHRONOLOGY: Key Dates for News Corporation

1923:: News Corporation is founded
1955:: Rupert Murdoch inherits Adelaide News in Australia from his father
1956:: Murdoch makes his first acquisition, the Perth Sunday Times, in Australia
1958:: Murdoch acquires his first television station, TV-9, in Adelaide Australia
1960:: Murdoch enters first major Australian market with acquisition of Sydney Mirror newspaper
1964:: Murdoch establishes The Australian, the first Australian newspaper of national scope.
1969:: Murdoch purchases Britain's News of the World
1970:: Murdoch acquires Britain's Sun newspaper
1973:: Rupert Murdoch acquires first U.S. holdings, the San Antonio Express and News newspapers
1974:: Murdoch acquires the National Star, which he renames the Star
1976:: Murdoch acquires the New York Post
1981:: Murdoch acquires the Times of London and the Sunday Times
1983:: Murdoch establishes Inter-American Satellite, Inc.
1985:: Rupert Murdoch becomes a U.S. citizen
1985:: Murdoch acquires 20th Century Fox Film Corporation
1986:: Murdoch acquires seven U.S. television stations and establishes Fox Television Network
1987:: Acquisition of U.S. publishing house Harper & Row Publishers and British publishers, William Collins & Sons
1988:: Murdoch establishes Sky Television, a satellite TV provider serving Europe
1993:: Star Television Ltd., based in Hong Kong, is founded
1995:: Murdoch finances the establishment of The Weekly Standard by William Kristol
1996:: Sky Television begins serving France and Germany
1997:: News Corp. purchases Los Angeles Dodgers major league baseball team
2001:: The FCC approves the sale of ten ChrisCraft TV stations to News Corp.; News Corporation is unable to purchase DirecTV from Hughes Electronics

HISTORY

News Corporation was founded in 1923 by Keith Murdoch, the father of Rupert Murdoch. By 1952, when the elder Murdoch died, the company consisted of a chain of papers that stretched across Australia. They were taken over by Rupert, whose single-minded pursuit of a media empire would frequently draw comparisons to another media mogul of the early twentieth century, William Randolph Hearst. In 1954, after a brief apprenticeship in Britain, Murdoch took over as the publisher of two News Ltd. papers, the Sunday Mail and the Adelaide News. To boost circulation, Murdoch made over the two papers in a way that would later become his trademark. They started reporting the news in an entertaining, accessible manner and they focused on the sensational—crime sex scandals, gossip. The formula worked. With the spoils of his success, Murdoch began buying other Australian newspapers and in 1958 his first TV station in Adelaide. Over the course of the next decade, he purchased a chain of TV stations in Australia.

A Murdoch pattern was emerging: an almost obsessive drive to expand the business empire with new acquisitions. Even as the company grew, Murdoch retained control of all executive decision-making, a factor that gave News Corp. the ability to quickly outmaneuver more traditionally organized competitors. In 1960, with the purchase of the Sydney Mirror, he penetrated the Australia's largest media market for the first time; in 1964 he founded the country's first national newspaper, The Australian. He entered the British market, with the 1969 purchase of News of the World, the English-language paper with the largest readership in the world, and expanded it with 1970 acquisition of the Sun, both of which adopted his tried and true formula of mayhem-and-sex—the Sun also introduced the infamous "Page Three girl"—a daily photo of an attractive woman with her shirt off. News Corp. topped off its U.K. newspaper empire in 1981 with the acquisition of the venerable Times of London and the Sunday Times. Murdoch was also acquiring U.S. newspapers. In 1974 he purchased the tabloid National Star, in 1976 the New York Post, and the Boston Herald, and the Chicago Sun-Times in 1982 and 1983 respectively.

In the 1980s Murdoch turned his attention to the lucrative U.S. television market. He first focused on cable and satellite TV and later—after Murdoch became a U.S. citizen in 1985—a group of six local broadcast stations which he christened the Fox Network. It was the first major challenge to the three major networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC since the late 1940s. The network took its name from the Twentieth Century Fox film studios which News Corp. purchased in 1985.

News Corp. moved into book publishing in the late 1980s, acquiring the U.K. house William Collins Publishing and the U.S. publisher Harper & Row in 1987, and in 1988 the religious publisher Zondervan. By 1990 News Corp. was also involved in magazine publishing with the Times Literary Supplement, Times Educational Supplement, and TV Guide. In 1995 Murdoch bankrolled William Kristol's Weekly Standard.

In the late 1980s and the 1990s News Corp. began creating a truly global media empire with the establishment of the firm's various satellite television ventures. Sky Television, a system servicing Europe, was launched in late 1988. The service was limited to the United Kingdom and Ireland until state television monopolies were dismantled in much of continental Europe. Finally in 1996, News Corp. forged pacts with France's Canal Plus and Germany's Bertelsmann AG, and Sky TV was beamed into those countries as well. In 2000, News Corp. acquired a 24 percent share of the German KirchGruppe's Kirch PayTV, which was subsequently renamed TaurusHolding. In 1993 News Corp. purchased Star Television Ltd, a five-channel network based in Hong Kong, and extended its service to most of Asia. A major area not served by STAR—the People's Republic of China—was conquered by News Corp. in 1996 when the company and the Chinese government established a joint venture. That same year, following the purchase of TV Asahi, News Corp. began broadcasts into Japan. With the establishment of Canal Fox, the company's Latin American satellite network, News Corporation had achieved penetration into every continent but Africa. News Corp. unified its satellite companies under the umbrella of Sky Global Networks. In 2001, an attempt to purchase DirecTV failed along with a plan to merge its Italian payTV service Stream with another Italian pay-TV service, Telepiu.

In the United States, News Corp. acquisitions continued apace, frequently to the dismay of Murdoch's critics. With (US) $2.7 billion from the spin-off of Fox Entertainment, the company bought the Los Angeles Dodgers of Major League Baseball—News Corp already owned the Australian National Rugby League—and later added significant shares in the NBA's New York Knicks and the NHL's New York Rangers. In 2001 News Corp.'s plan to purchase 10 local U.S. stations from Chris-Craft was approved by the Federal Communications Commission. An attempt to purchase DirecTV from the General Motors subsidiary Hughes electronics fell through in late 2001.

STRATEGY

The hallmark strategy of News Corp. has been attention to cost-cutting and the bottom line of its companies day-to-day operations. There have been exceptions, for example, its decision to bid over $400 million for the rights to the European Champions League soccer broadcasts in Europe to launch a new German cable channel, TM3. But that illustrates another trait of News Corp.—the willingness to pull out all the stops to make a success of a venture. Sports have always been an important means of creating instant viewership, as in the middle 1990s when the upstart Fox Network went after and obtained the rights to NFL broadcasts. Another strategy that News Corp. used from its earliest days under Rupert Murdoch, was to use the value of his existing companies to finance continued growth. Under-performing firms or ineffective companies were sold off and the proceeds put back into new acquisitions.

News Corp. is famous for focusing unapologetically on the lowest common denominator of public taste, for example the New York Post, theSun, the Star, and some of its Fox Network televisions shows. Crime, sex, and celebrity scandals are found everywhere. Despite the rebuke of critics, the formula has usually worked for the company. Despite his well-known conservative leanings, Murdoch does not to let politics interfere with a business deal. Hence, despite years of zealous anti-communism, he was willing to become a partner in a satellite TV venture with the government of the People's Republic of China.

INFLUENCES

Although many companies successfully embraced the Internet revolution, News Corp was unable to break into the Internet economy in any significant manner. All of its attempts to do so failed. Murdoch's son, James suffered a great loss in 1995 when communications company, MCI pulled out of a planned alliance that would have backed a Web site called iGuide. His deal to buy another Internet company, Pointcast—whose software later proved to have fatal flaws—broke down at the eleventh hour. The elder Murdoch also brokered a deal to enter the Internet business. He bought into a Japanese Internet firm, Soft Bank, which went out of business when the Internet bubble burst in late 2000. Despite Murdoch's 1999 promise that News Corporation would be based squarely on Internet businesses, by 2002 News Corporation had largely abandoned efforts at quick expansion into cybermedia and refocused its sights on satellite television.

CURRENT TRENDS

News Corp. has continued efforts to expand its television network in the United States. In 2001 the FCC approved the sale of ten Chris Craft owned television stations to News Corporation. The sale was the first one approved under new rules permitting a company to own two stations in the same market. The ChrisCraft sale gave News Corp. two stations—duopolies, the company calls them—in three major U.S. markets, New York City, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. Newscorp would have had two stations in Salt Lake City, but the law bars owning two stations where there are four or fewer stations. Other deals with Viacom and ClearChannel Communications gave News Corporation duopolies in four other U.S. TV markets: Dallas, Houston, Washington D.C., and Minneapolis. Murdoch also attempted to purchase DirecTV in 2001. If it had succeeded, the U.S. company would have closed a major gap in Murdoch's international satellite TV network. The deal with Hughes Electronics fell apart.

PRODUCTS

News Corporation has been responsible for many of the most popular and successful television programs in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The hit TV shows Fox has produced include The Simpsons, The X-Files, Ally McBeal, King of the Hill, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Malcolm in the Middle. Fox Filmed Entertainment and News Corporations other film businesses gave the world hit movies such as Titanic, Moulin Rouge, Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, Fight Club, and Quills. These News Corp. products created unique ongoing synergies. After the theatrical release, Fox films were re-released on video and DVD by Fox Home Entertainment. Similarly, Fox's television shows have frequently gone into profitable syndication on its own stations.

NEWS CORP. CONQUERS BULGARIA

Rupert Murdoch made headlines when he bought four of the leading British newspapers; likewise, when he launched his upstart Fox Television in the United States. The media did not take as much notice, however, when Murdoch conquered one of the last European frontiers—Bulgaria. Financial problems caused News Corp. to miss out on the first wave of Eastern European investment in the early 1990s. But at the end of the decade, in February 2000, New Corporation was awarded the country's first commercial TV license. The news service, Balkan News Corporation, went into operation in summer 2000. It seemed an unlikely acquisition for a man with Murdoch's multi-million-dollar ambitions. Bulgaria is a nation with few resources and it is not clear where advertising revenues will come from. However, News Corp. has bigger plans for the station. The firm wants to make it the base for a TV service that will eventually cover the entire Balkan region, including Romania, Serbia, Croatia, and Macedonia.

GLOBAL PRESENCE

News Corporation's global arms extends into virtually every corner of the world—only Africa remains outside its reach. In Europe British Sky Broadcasting is growing, along with Stream in Italy. In 2001 News Corp. inaugurated the Balkan News Corporation based in Bulgaria. STAR, News Corp.'s Pan-Asian service has a viewership that extends from the Middle East, through the Indian subcontinent, into Southeast Asia and beyond. The service was particularly successful in India where STAR Plus was the number one Hindu station in 2001 with 39 of India's top 50 television shows. Canal Fox provides programming for Latin America. Seventy percent of all British adults read a News Corp. newspaper. The firm is strongly represented in Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific islands. In Australia it owns and operates more than 100 newspapers, the National Rugby League, and music, software, Internet, and technology companies. It has interests in Fox Studios Australia, which made Moulin Rouge and produced Star Wars Episode Two, Fox Sports Australia, and many other companies.

EMPLOYMENT

News Corporation employs some 30,000 people in all areas of entertainment and media, including producers, directors, writers and actors, and technicians for film and television; journalists, editors, and printing workers for the firm's magazines and newspapers; programmers and software writers.

SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Bibliography

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crainer, stuart and des dearlove. business the rupert murdoch way: 10 secrets of the world's greatest deal-maker. amacom, 1999.

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"family." independent, november 16, 1999.

"from murdoch, a health bulletin." business week, december 20, 1999.

hickey, neil. "is fox news fair?" columbia journalism review, march, 1998/april, 1998.

james, steve. "murdoch's dodgers start era of rupert ball in l.a." detroit news, april 8, 1998.

kuczynski, alex. "tv guide sold for $9.2 billion in stock deal." new york times, october 5, 1999.

"murdoch's newest gooooaaaal." time, september 12, 1998.

neil, andrew. "murdoch and me." vanity fair, december 1996.

"news corporation." hoover's company profiles, 2002. available at http://www.hoovers.com.

roberts, johnnie l. "the man behind rupert's roll." newsweek, july 12, 1999.

"rupert murdoch," american decades cd-rom. farmington hills, mi: gale research, 1998.

"rupert murdoch." encyclopedia of world biography: 2nd ed. farmington hills, mi: gale research, 1998.

"rupert does the cyberhustle." business week, july 12, 1999.

"rupert murdoch picks sides between money and honesty." herald, march 3, 1998.

"rupert's misses." economist, july 3, 1999.

shah, diane k. "will rupert buy l.a.?" los angeles magazine, december 1997.

shawcross, william. "rupert murdoch." time international, october 25, 1999.

——. murdoch. new york: simon and schuster, 1992.

tuccille, jerome. rupert murdoch.new york: fine, 1989.

For an annual report:

on the internet at: http://www.newscorp.com/public/ir/indexor write: news corporation, 1211 avenue of the americas, new york, ny 10036

For additional industry research:

investigate companies by their standard industrial classification codes, also known as sics. news corporation limited's primary sics are:

2711 newspapers: publishing or publishing & printing

4833 television broadcasting

7812 motion picture, video tape production

also investigate companies by their north american industrial classification system codes, also known as naics codes. news corporation limited's primary naics codes are:

511110 newspaper publishing

513120 television broadcaaasting

Company Profiles for Students

News Corporation Limited

News Corporation Limited

Principal Subsidiaries

Further Reading

News Corporation Limited

News Corporation Limited

Principal Subsidiaries

Further Reading

News Corporation Limited

News Corporation Limited

Beginnings of News Coporation

The Building of an Empire: 1960s–1970s

Company Perspectives:

Focus on Publishing: Early 1980s

Key Dates:

Diversifying Into Satellite Television: 1983

Growth Through Acquisition: Late 1980s

Financial Woes: 1989–1990

Success After Financial Restructuring: Early-to-Mid 1990s

Emerging As a Powerhouse: Mid-to-Late 1990s

Alliances for the New Millennium

Principal Subsidiaries

Principal Operating Units

Principal Competitors

Further Reading

News Corporation Limited

News Corporation Limited

Contact Information:

OVERVIEW

COMPANY FINANCES

FAST FACTS: About News Corporation Limited

ANALYSTS' OPINIONS

CHRONOLOGY: Key Dates for News Corporation

HISTORY

STRATEGY

INFLUENCES

CURRENT TRENDS

PRODUCTS

NEWS CORP. CONQUERS BULGARIA

GLOBAL PRESENCE

EMPLOYMENT

SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Bibliography

For an annual report:

For additional industry research:

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