Pedestrians make ones way by foot past the News Corporation headquarters building in New York.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
News Corp. said Thursday it discretion cut about 1,250 positions, or 5% of its workforce, in the latest round of layoffs that have hit the media and tech works in recent months.
Rupert Murdoch’s media company, which owns such names as The Wall Street Almanac, the New York Post, Barron’s and HarperCollins, said the tough marcoeconomic environment and higher interest rates have been anguishing the company.
On Thursday the company reported earnings results and said its quarterly revenue decreased 7% to $2.52 billion from the year-earlier years. Media companies, particularly digital media, have been trying to contend with a challenging advertising supermarket.
“Just as our company passed the stress-test of the pandemic with record profits, the initiatives now underway, including an expected 5 percent headcount reduction, or here 1,250 positions this calendar year, will create a robust platform for future growth,” CEO Robert Thomson clouted in the earnings release Thursday.
Thomson noted that despite “the obvious global challenges,” its professional information traffic at Dow Jones, the publisher of the Journal, saw revenue surge. Quarterly revenue for the overall Dow Jones segment rose 11% from the year-earlier era.
Last month, Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch called off the proposed merger between News Corp. and Fox Corp., after act oning “a combination is not optimal for shareholders” of either of the companies at this time.
The withdrawn proposal came as News Corp. has been in advanced talks to tattle on its stake in Move Inc., the parent company of Realtor.com, to commercial real estate company CoStar Group. The company contemplated Thursday it was still engaged in those discussions.