Anyone interested in News Corp. and how the company will look as it splits into two should read the article at PaidContent, the Bloomberg article and the Reuters article at Huffington Post. While the latest results for News aren’t great for print, including Australian newspapers, they say the upside is good post-split.
Crikey has a more more detailed and local perspective on the latest results and split including this:
Like Fairfax in Australia and Gannett in the US, News Corp is hostage to the advertising sector. The Australian pay TV businesses — 100% of Fox Sports, 50% of Foxtel and 44% of Sky in NZ — won’t be enough to offset this weakness, nor will the Australian digital real estate business, the Harper Collins publishing entity (which is facing pressures of its own from e-books) or the nascent education business called Amplify.
And this:
For the three-month period to September 30, new News Corp relied on advertising for 48% of that $US2.13 billion in revenues, with 28.5% coming from circulation and subscription income. In total, more than 78% of revenues for the quarter came from the traditional analogue media sources (82% in the same quarter of 2011). Newspaper revenues fell 6% or $US102 million from the September quarter of 2011 to the same quarter this year.