Pedestrians walk past the News Corporation headquarters in New York.
Michael Nagel | Bloomberg | Getty Images
News Corp. said Thursday it will cut about 1,250 jobs, or 5% of its workforce, in the latest round of layoffs that have hit the media and technology industries in recent months.
Rupert Murdoch’s media company, which owns names like The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Barron’s and HarperCollins, said the tough macroeconomic environment and higher interest rates hurt the company.
On Thursday, the company reported earnings results and said quarterly revenue fell 7% to $2.52 billion from the same period last year. Media companies, especially digital media, have been trying to cope with a challenging advertising market.
“Just as our company passed the stress test of the pandemic with record profits, the initiatives now underway, including an anticipated 5 percent headcount reduction, or approximately 1,250 jobs this calendar year, will create a robust platform for future growth,” says CEO Robert Thomson said in a press release on Thursday.
Thomson noted that despite “the obvious global challenges,” the professional information division of Dow Jones, the Journal’s publisher, saw sales increase. Quarterly sales for the entire Dow Jones segment increased 11% over the same period last year.
Last month, Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch completed the proposed merger between News Corp TBEN Corp., having determined “a combination is not optimal for shareholders” of one of the companies at this time.
The withdrawn proposal came when News Corp. was in advanced talks to sell its stake in Move Inc., the parent company of Realtor.com, to commercial real estate company CoStar Group. The company said Thursday it was still in those talks.
