Rupert Murdoch
Champion of sales and views, who's on the first page and makes first pages. Rupert Murdoch develops his media business through more than six decades. Nowadays his empire includes two big companies. 21st Century Fox Inc. manages the entertainment business and News Corporation the journalistic publications
He was born in Australia on the 11th of March, 1931 and, just after he reached 22 years of age, he continued his father's work in News Limited, which gather a number of regional publications.
His preparatory internship in the newspaper Daily Express in London, gave him some background for the construction of what would be the Murdoch empire. In News Limited, he bet all his chips in the promotion of publications: wrote titles, elaborated layouts and watched the printing of newspapers. He left nothing to chance; everything went through him.
All this effort had to result in something, and resulted in a more sensationalist journalism form, in a tabloid, which was a hit in Australia and spread to other countries.
Again in London, 37 years old Rupert Murdoch acquired the newspaper News of the World. In 1969, a year later, he bought the The Sun. Then it was just repeating the same method: proceed to the tabloidization of the two newspapers and profit from it on newsstands.
Because there is no two without a three, Rupert decided to do the same also in the USA. He bought the newspaper San Antonio News in 1973, founded the The Star in 1974 and acquired the New York Post in 1976.
Three years later, in 1979, he founded News Corp., a holding company of News Limited. The purchase of more publications followed, as the Chicago Sun-Times, the Village Voice and New York Magazine in North America, and the Times and Sunday Times of London in the UK.
The next big step was to invest in television and entertainment markets in the mid-eighties, with the purchase of 20th Century Fox Film Corporation and several independent channels of FOX, Inc., the largest US television network. He also extended a branch of his empire to Asia and created the channel Star TV.
In addition to the publications themselves, he began to invest in the editorial market. The turn of the century brought to Rupert Murdoch’s news empire Intermix Media, owner of the social network MySpace and Dow Jones, which holds the Wall Street Journal.
It is only in 2011 that the Murdoch legacy suffers its first major blow. The British weekly News of the World, at 168 years of age, publishes its last edition after having been involved in a scandal involving eavesdropping. It was the end of the best-selling tabloid in the UK.
Two years later, Rupert Murdoch announces he would restructure his empire and divided it into two base-companies: 21st Century Fox Inc. and News Corporation. This was a watershed, with the entertainment on one side and the news content on the other.
In June 2015, over 60 years after he started to follow his father's footsteps, Rupert Murdoch gives media business folder to his son, James Murdoch.
If the child will be on his father's and his grandfather’s level, it is to be known… But whatever it is the outcome of the Murdoch empire, it will certainly be on a newspaper cover one day.