News Corporation (NWS): History, Ownership, Mission, How It Works & Makes Money

How does a media empire like News Corporation (NWS) manage to grow its profit by over 70% while its traditional News Media segment revenue declines? You're looking at a company that generated $8.45 billion in total revenue for the 2025 fiscal year, but the real story is its pivot, where Digital Real Estate Services and Dow Jones drove a massive 71% surge in net income from continuing operations to $648 million.

This isn't just about newspapers and books; it's a masterclass in monetizing information and data, which is why we need to unpack the dual-class share structure and how core assets like Dow Jones's $2.33 billion in revenue actually work to keep the whole machine running.

You defintely need to understand which segments are fueling the future-and which ones are just legacy-to make an informed decision on this complex global player.

News Corporation (NWS) History

You're looking at News Corporation (NWS) today and seeing a diversified media and information giant, but to defintely understand its valuation, you have to look past the marquee names like The Wall Street Journal and see the strategic pivot that created the current company.

Honestly, the history of News Corporation is a story of two distinct eras. The current entity, the publishing and information powerhouse, was born from a massive corporate restructuring in 2013, separating it from the film and television assets that became 21st Century Fox.

Given Company's Founding Timeline

Year established

The roots of the media empire go back to the founding of News Limited in 1923 in Australia, but the current, publicly-traded News Corporation (NWS) entity was formally established on June 28, 2013, through a corporate spin-off from the original News Corporation.

Original location

The predecessor company, News Limited, began in Adelaide, South Australia. The current News Corporation, however, is headquartered in New York City, New York, reflecting its global focus and US stock listing.

Founding team members

The entire structure is a legacy of Rupert Murdoch, who founded the original conglomerate and engineered the 2013 split. The leadership of the new, focused company was established with Rupert Murdoch as Chairman and Robert Thomson as Chief Executive.

Initial capital/funding

The current News Corporation was not founded with a traditional capital raise; it was a spin-off. Its initial valuation, based on its share price upon trading on July 1, 2013, was approximately $7.9 billion. Shareholders of the old News Corporation received one share of the new NWS for every four shares they owned in the original company.

Given Company's Evolution Milestones

Given Company's Transformative Moments

The single most transformative moment was the 2013 demerger. That decision wasn't just a corporate maneuver; it was a clear signal to the market that the company's future lay in information and digital services, not just traditional media.

The separation allowed the new News Corporation to focus capital on high-growth, high-margin areas. This is where the real money is being made now, so you need to pay attention to the segments like Digital Real Estate Services and Dow Jones.

• The Digital Real Estate Pivot: The company aggressively grew its stake in REA Group and operates Move, Inc. (Realtor.com®), making digital real estate a primary revenue engine. This segment posted record revenues of $1.25 billion for the full 2025 fiscal year.
• The Information Services Shift: Dow Jones has successfully pivoted its business model, with digital revenues representing 82% of its total revenues in the 2025 fiscal year. Its professional information business, especially Risk & Compliance, grew 15% in FY2025.
• Simplification in 2025: The agreement to sell Foxtel for A$3.4 billion in enterprise value is a recent, clear move to simplify operations and increase focus on the core growth pillars. It's a classic move to unlock value.

If you want to dive deeper into who is buying into this focused strategy, you should read Exploring News Corporation (NWS) Investor Profile: Who's Buying and Why?

News Corporation (NWS) Ownership Structure

News Corporation operates with a dual-class share structure, a common setup that grants the Murdoch family, through their holdings of Class B shares, disproportionate voting control over the company's strategic direction, despite a smaller economic stake.

This structure means the family controls the majority of the voting power, even as institutional and individual investors hold the bulk of the overall equity. It's a critical factor to understand for any investor looking at the governance of a media conglomerate like this.

News Corporation's Current Status

News Corporation is a publicly traded, global, diversified media and information services company, headquartered in New York City.

It trades on the Nasdaq under two ticker symbols: NWSA for the Class A Common Stock (limited voting rights) and NWS for the Class B Common Stock (full voting rights).

For the fiscal year 2025, the company reported a revenue increase to approximately $8.45 billion and a net income of around $1.18 billion, solidifying its position in digital real estate, news media, and book publishing. The dual-class setup, while concentrating power, has been a point of contention with activist investors seeking a one-share, one-vote structure. If you want a deeper dive into the shareholder base, check out Exploring News Corporation (NWS) Investor Profile: Who's Buying and Why?

News Corporation's Ownership Breakdown

The ownership breakdown, based on the most recent fiscal year 2025 data, highlights the significant control held by insiders, primarily the Murdoch Family Trust, and the high concentration of institutional money. Here's the quick math on the float:

News Corporation's Leadership

The company is steered by a seasoned, albeit long-tenured, executive team and a board where the Murdoch family maintains ultimate authority. The average tenure for the management team is about 3.8 years, showing a mix of stability and recent changes.

Key members of the leadership and board as of November 2025:

• Lachlan Murdoch: Chair of the Board.
• Robert Thomson: Chief Executive Officer (CEO). He has served in this role since January 2013, with his contract extended to June 2030. His total compensation for the fiscal year 2025 was approximately $20.62 million.
• Lavanya Chandrashekar: Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO), who officially joined in January 2025, succeeding Susan Panuccio.
• Rupert Murdoch: Chairman Emeritus.
• David Pitofsky: Executive Vice President and General Counsel.
• Julian Delany: Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

The board, which includes directors like José María Aznar and Natalie Bancroft, was re-elected at the Annual Meeting on November 19, 2025, with strong shareholder support, defintely confirming the current governance structure.

News Corporation (NWS) Mission and Values

News Corporation's core purpose moves beyond simple profit, focusing on its role as a global provider of authoritative, engaging content that aims to inform, inspire, and deliver value to both its customers and its shareholders. This dual commitment is the cultural DNA that guides its diverse portfolio, from Exploring News Corporation (NWS) Investor Profile: Who's Buying and Why? to its book publishing arm.

You need to understand what this company stands for, especially when its Fiscal Year 2025 full-year total revenues hit $8.45 billion, a 2% increase, which is defintely a solid performance in a challenging media environment. That revenue is a direct result of their mission in action.

News Corporation's Core Purpose

The company's cultural foundation is built on three pillars-Passion, Principle, and Purpose-which drive its operations across news, digital real estate, and book publishing. This focus on content integrity and value creation is what separates the long-term players from the transient ones in the media space.

• Trusted Journalism: A commitment to producing news and information crucial for a healthy, functioning society.
• Intellectual Property Advocacy: Actively fighting to protect the value of original content in the AI age, as CEO Robert Thomson has stressed.
• Shareholder Value: A dedication to maximizing returns, evidenced by the 71% increase in net income from continuing operations to $648 million in Fiscal Year 2025.

Official mission statement

The formal mission statement is a clear articulation of their intent to be a unifying force across their disparate businesses, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

• News Corporation is a company truly greater than the sum of its parts.
• Driven by passion, guided by principles and acting with purpose.
• Dedicated to delivering value to our customers and our shareholders with premium products and services that inform and inspire.

Vision statement

The vision is about global market leadership, but it ties that leadership directly back to the quality and utility of the content they produce. It's a simple, but ambitious, goal.

• To be the leading global diversified media and information services company.
• Providing trusted content and services that inform, entertain, and empower audiences and businesses worldwide.

News Corporation slogan/tagline

Their unofficial tagline is a concise summary of their operating philosophy, a clean one-liner that tells you everything you need to know about their internal culture and external posture.

• Passionate. Principled. Purposeful.

News Corporation (NWS) How It Works

News Corporation operates as a diversified media and information services company, creating value by distributing authoritative content and data across four core segments: Digital Real Estate Services, Dow Jones, Book Publishing, and News Media. The company drives its profits by converting traditional media consumption into high-margin digital subscriptions and professional information products, which helped it achieve a Total Segment EBITDA of over $1.42 billion in fiscal year 2025.

News Corporation's Product/Service Portfolio

The company's strategy is centered on its three growth pillars, which collectively generated the majority of its fiscal 2025 revenue. Dow Jones, for example, delivered record revenues of $2.33 billion for the full year.

News Corporation's Operational Framework

The operational process is a deliberate shift from print-centric advertising to a model prioritizing digital subscriptions and B2B (business-to-business) data services. It's all about owning the content and then distributing it across the highest-value channels.

• Content-to-Subscription Funnel: Core news brands like The Wall Street Journal create premium, proprietary content that is gated behind a paywall. This converts casual readers into high-value, recurring digital subscribers, where nearly 90% of core brand subscriptions are now digital-only.
• Digital Real Estate Monetization: The Digital Real Estate Services segment, which includes Realtor.com and REA Group, generates revenue primarily through advertising and premium listings sold to real estate agents and developers, focusing on technology improvements and adjacency revenue growth.
• B2B Data Expansion: Dow Jones actively repackages its journalistic content and financial data into specialized, recurring professional information products, such as Risk & Compliance data feeds, which grew 15% in FY2025.
• Asset Streamlining: The company recently sold its stake in the Foxtel Group to DAZN for an enterprise value of A$3.4 billion, which simplifies the structure and focuses capital on the core growth pillars.

You can see the clear focus here on quality over volume. Check out the Mission Statement, Vision, & Core Values of News Corporation (NWS).

News Corporation's Strategic Advantages

In a volatile media landscape, News Corporation's competitive edge comes down to a few defintely non-replicable assets and a clear-eyed focus on intellectual property.

• Authoritative Global Brands: The company owns some of the world's most recognizable and trusted brands, including The Wall Street Journal, The Times, and HarperCollins Publishers, which command premium pricing power and subscriber loyalty.
• High-Margin Digital Transformation: News Corporation has successfully transitioned from a declining print advertising model to a growing digital subscription and B2B data model, leading to margin expansion across all segments in the third quarter of FY2025.
• Intellectual Property (IP) Defense: The company is aggressively asserting the value of its content against Generative AI (artificial intelligence) companies, including a high-profile legal action against Perplexity, aiming to establish a framework for content licensing and monetization in the AI age.
• Market Dominance in Digital Real Estate: Its 61% stake in REA Group gives it a dominant position in the Australian residential property listings market, providing a stable, high-growth revenue stream insulated from traditional media volatility.

News Corporation (NWS) How It Makes Money

News Corporation (NWS) generates its revenue primarily by selling authoritative, high-value content and digital services across four core segments: professional information, digital real estate listings, book publishing, and news media. It's a diversified model, shifting away from volatile print advertising toward stable subscriptions and digital real estate transaction services.

News Corporation's Revenue Breakdown

Looking at the Fiscal Year 2025 (FY2025) results, which ended June 30, 2025, News Corporation reported total revenues of $8.452 billion. This breakdown shows where the real financial power lies, with the Dow Jones and News Media segments contributing almost equally, but with vastly different growth trajectories.

Business Economics

The economics of News Corporation are a story of digital transformation, where high-margin subscription and service revenue is replacing low-margin print advertising. The business is defintely a portfolio of assets, not a single monolithic media company.

• Subscription Power at Dow Jones: This segment's revenue is driven by high-value professional information services, like Risk & Compliance, which saw strong growth. Crucially, digital revenues now represent 82% of total Dow Jones revenues, making this stream highly predictable and less cyclical than advertising.
• Real Estate Leverage: The Digital Real Estate Services segment, which includes REA Group and Realtor.com, is the most profitable on a margin basis. It delivered the highest Segment EBITDA at $601 million in FY2025. This segment makes money through premium listings, advertising, and value-added services tied to real estate transactions, profiting from market volume and price increases.
• The News Media Cost Challenge: The News Media segment, which includes major mastheads, still generates a significant portion of revenue, but its revenue declined by 4% in FY2025. The segment's strategy is a defensive one: rigorous cost discipline and a push for digital subscriptions. Digital revenue makes up about 38% of this segment's total, a critical threshold for sustainability.
• Book Publishing's Backlist Stability: The Book Publishing segment benefits from a strong backlist (older, perennial titles), which accounted for approximately 64% of Consumer revenues in FY2025. This provides a stable, recurring revenue base that smooths out the volatility of new release sales.

You can see the full strategic focus in the Mission Statement, Vision, & Core Values of News Corporation (NWS).

News Corporation's Financial Performance

The Fiscal Year 2025 results show a company benefiting from its strategic shift to digital growth pillars, even as traditional news media faces headwinds. The overall picture is one of margin expansion and improved profitability.

• Total Revenue and Growth: Full year revenues for FY2025 reached $8.452 billion, a modest 2% increase over the prior year, demonstrating that the growth in digital real estate, Dow Jones, and book publishing offset the decline in news media.
• Profit Surge: Net income from continuing operations surged to $648 million, a substantial 71% increase compared to the prior year, which is a clear sign that cost controls and higher-margin digital businesses are paying off.
• EBITDA Strength: Total Segment EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) hit $1.415 billion, an increase of 14% year-over-year. This metric best reflects the operational health of the core businesses before corporate overhead.
• Shareholder Returns: The company's strong financial position led the Board to authorize a new $1 billion stock repurchase program in July 2025, signaling confidence in future cash flow and a commitment to returning capital to shareholders.
• Earnings Per Share: Reported diluted Earnings Per Share (EPS) from continuing operations was $0.84 for the full year, a significant jump from $0.47 in the prior year.

Here's the quick math: Digital Real Estate Services and Dow Jones combined generated over $1.18 billion in Segment EBITDA in FY2025, representing the vast majority of the company's operating profit, making them the crucial focus for future investment.

News Corporation (NWS) Market Position & Future Outlook

News Corporation is successfully executing a pivot, shifting its core value from traditional newsprint to high-margin digital information services and real estate. This strategy is working: the company delivered fiscal year 2025 (FY2025) total revenues of $8.45 billion, a 2% increase, with net income from continuing operations surging 71% to $648 million, driven by its Digital Real Estate Services, Dow Jones, and Book Publishing segments.

The future hinges on accelerating the growth of its business-to-business (B2B) data and digital real estate segments while aggressively managing the structural decline in its legacy News Media division, which saw a 4% revenue drop to $2.17 billion in FY2025.

Competitive Landscape

The company's strength lies not in dominating a single market, but in holding a top-tier position across three distinct, high-value sectors. It's a diversified portfolio play, so the competitive view needs to be segmented. News Corporation's core competitive advantage is the authoritative, trusted content of brands like The Wall Street Journal and the exclusive data access of Realtor.com.

Opportunities & Challenges

The near-term focus is clear: expand B2B data offerings and monetize the company's vast content library through new channels, all while defending against market volatility. Honestly, the biggest opportunity is simply executing on the digital strategy they've already laid out.

Industry Position

News Corporation holds a unique, diversified position that insulates it somewhat from single-industry shocks. You can't put them in one box. Their Total Segment EBITDA of $1.42 billion in FY2025 shows the power of this model.

• Dominant Global Real Estate: The REA Group is the market leader in Australia, and Realtor.com is the definitive number-two portal in the challenging U.S. market.
• Premium B2B Information: Dow Jones, with its flagship The Wall Street Journal, is a top-tier provider of professional data and news, directly competing with the scale of Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg.
• Global Publishing Scale: HarperCollins is the second largest consumer book publisher globally, providing a stable, backlist-driven revenue stream that is defintely resilient.
• Capital Strength: The company's financial health is robust, evidenced by the new $1 billion stock repurchase program announced in July 2025, which underscores management's confidence and commitment to returning capital to shareholders.

For a deeper dive into the numbers underpinning this strategy, you should check out Breaking Down News Corporation (NWS) Financial Health: Key Insights for Investors.