News Corporation

News Corporation is an American global media and information services company that owns The Wall Street Journal, HarperCollins Publishers, realtor.com, and the leading Australian property platform REA Group, generating $8.45 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. The company was created in 2013 through the separation of Rupert Murdoch's original News Corporation into two entities — the entertainment assets became 21st Century Fox, while the publishing and Australian media assets formed the new News Corp — and it has spent the past decade transforming itself from a newspaper-centric conglomerate into a digital-first information and real estate business that increasingly looks more like a data company than a media company.

This is a story about whether the portfolio's genuine crown jewels — a B2B risk-and-compliance data franchise growing at 20%, the most-visited real estate portal in Australia, and the second-largest consumer book publisher on earth — are worth substantially more than the market currently credits, and whether the buyback that management has accelerated to four times its prior pace can close the gap before the structural pressures on the remaining print assets become more than a footnote. The company's own framing is that it is an "AI inputs company" whose proprietary data and journalism are essential feedstock for the artificial intelligence era, and it is negotiating — and in some cases litigating — to be paid accordingly.

The file turns on a single question: whether Dow Jones's Professional Information Business can grow into the $1 billion EBITDA franchise management has targeted within five years while the digital real estate and book publishing segments contribute steady compounding, or whether the sum-of-parts discount the stock has long carried reflects something more durable than investor myopia.