News Corp.

NWSA ·Communication Services, Publishing, United States

News Corporation Class A (NWSA)

Overview

News Corporation is a global media and information services company headquartered at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in New York City. It sits in the Communication Services sector, within the "Publishing" and broader entertainment/media industry. For its fiscal year ended June 30, 2025, News Corp generated roughly $8.5–9.0 billion in revenue (trailing twelve months near $9.0 billion) and employed approximately 21,700–22,300 people worldwide. Note on ticker classes: NWSA is News Corp's Class A common stock, which trades on Nasdaq and carries no voting rights. It is one of two publicly listed share classes of the exact same company — the other, NWS, is the Class B voting stock, held in large part by the Murdoch family. NWSA and NWS represent identical economic claims on the same underlying business; this breakdown, and the companion NWS breakdown, describe that single company in full.

What They Do & How They Make Money

News Corp was spun off from the original News Corporation in 2013 (split from what became 21st Century Fox/Disney), separating the print-and-publishing businesses from film and television. It now earns money primarily through five channels: subscription revenue from financial and general news publications (print and digital), advertising sales across its news mastheads and radio stations, book sales and licensing through its publishing arm, digital "lead generation" and listing fees from real estate marketplaces, and licensing/data fees for financial information products. In short, News Corp monetizes trusted content and audience attention — readers pay to access journalism (The Wall Street Journal, The Times, The Sun, The Australian), advertisers pay to reach those readers, homebuyers and real-estate agents pay for property-listing visibility, and book buyers pay for HarperCollins titles across genres and languages.

Business Segments

News Corp reports results across five segments:

Dow Jones: The company's largest and fastest-growing profit engine, encompassing The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch, Investor's Business Daily, and professional information products such as Dow Jones Newswires, Factiva, Risk & Compliance, and OPIS (energy/commodity pricing data). Revenue mixes consumer subscriptions with high-margin B2B data and news-wire licensing to financial institutions and corporations.
Book Publishing: Operated through HarperCollins, one of the "Big Five" English-language publishers, with more than 120 imprints (Harper, William Morrow, Ecco, HarperOne, Thomas Nelson, Zondervan) and the romance/genre-fiction publisher Harlequin. Revenue comes from print, e-book, and audiobook sales, plus backlist licensing; HarperCollins reported profit growth in fiscal 2025.
Digital Real Estate Services: Built around REA Group (majority-owned, ASX-listed), operator of Australia's dominant property portal realestate.com.au plus international real-estate marketplaces, and Move, Inc., which runs Realtor.com in the U.S. Revenue comes from agent subscriptions, premium listing placements, and lead-generation fees — a high-margin, advertising-adjacent digital model.
News Media: Australian and UK newspaper and broadcast operations, including The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, The Sun and The Times (UK), plus News Corp's talkSPORT radio network (via the former Wireless Group). This segment relies on subscriptions, single-copy sales, and advertising, and has faced the longest-running secular pressure from the shift to digital media.
Other: Includes News Corp's investment activities, corporate items, and smaller ventures such as digital education (Foxtel-related video/streaming interests were divested in 2024, removing the prior Subscription Video Services segment from the portfolio).

Dow Jones and Digital Real Estate Services together generate the bulk of segment profit, with Dow Jones alone typically contributing well over half of total operating profit in recent years, reflecting the strength of WSJ digital subscriptions and B2B data products.

Competitors

Dow Jones (financial news/data): Bloomberg L.P., Thomson Reuters/Refinitiv, the Financial Times (Nikkei), and Bloomberg Terminal-style data providers.
Book Publishing: The other "Big Five" publishers — Penguin Random House (Bertelsmann), Hachette Livre, Simon & Schuster (KKR), and Macmillan (Holtzbrinck) — plus Amazon Publishing and self-publishing platforms.
Digital Real Estate: Domain Group (Nine Entertainment) in Australia; Zillow, CoStar Group (Homes.com), and Redfin in the U.S. real estate listings market.
News Media: The Guardian, Daily Mail, Telegraph Media Group, and BBC News in the UK; Nine Entertainment (The Age, Sydney Morning Herald) in Australia; broadly, all outlets competing for print/digital ad dollars and reader attention, including social and streaming platforms.

Competitive Position

News Corp's moat rests on brand trust and scale in categories where switching costs and reputational barriers are real: The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones's professional data products are deeply embedded in finance-industry workflows, HarperCollins benefits from author relationships and backlist scale that are difficult for new entrants to replicate, and REA Group/Realtor.com benefit from network effects (more listings attract more buyers, which attracts more agents). Lachlan Murdoch's family holds concentrated voting control via Class B (NWS) shares, giving management strategic continuity but also concentrating governance risk in the family. Key threats include continued secular decline in print advertising and circulation for legacy newspapers, competitive pressure on Realtor.com from Zillow's larger audience share, potential softness in the housing market curbing real-estate segment growth, and reliance on subscriber growth at the WSJ to offset weaker print economics. The company has also faced periodic governance and reputational scrutiny tied to its news properties. Overall, News Corp is positioned as a diversified, cash-generative media holding company with two genuine growth engines (Dow Jones digital/data and REA Group) balancing a maturing print-media core.