News Corp 2025
News Corp’s fiscal 2025 results read like a celebration of resilience: revenue edged up to $8.45bn, income from continuing operations rose to $648m, and management presents the year as a proof point that the company’s portfolio is “thriving” in a turbulent environment. Yet the more interesting story is not the headline profitability. It is the way News Corp’s business model is quietly hardening around two activities that behave less like journalism and more like infrastructure: premium business intelligence (Dow Jones) and transactional property marketplaces (REA Group and Move/Realtor.com).
The company’s newsrooms remain politically and culturally influential, but, financially, News Corp is increasingly being carried by assets whose economics are simply better suited to the post-platform, AI-shaped media market. The 10-K doesn’t announce this pivot as a doctrine; it reveals it through the numbers and the risk language.
Consolidated snapshot (FY2025 vs FY2024)
| Metric | FY2025 | FY2024 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total revenue | $8.452bn | $8.252bn | +2% |
| Net income from continuing ops | $648m | $379m | +71% |
| Total segment EBITDA | $1.415bn | $1.241bn | +14% |
| Net income attributable to shareholders | $1.180bn | $266m | +344% |
That last line is the hook for many readers, but it is also where the narrative can mislead. The leap in shareholder-attributable net income sits alongside the company’s decision to classify Foxtel as discontinued operations, a choice justified as a “strategic shift” with major effect on operations. The Foxtel sale produced a $716m pre-tax gain and, crucially, did not end News Corp’s relationship with the asset: the company took a 6% equity stake in DAZN (valued at $648m) and a board seat, while also receiving cash repayment of Foxtel shareholder loans (about $380m). This is easy to miss because it sits in the mechanics of the transaction, but it matters strategically: News Corp stepped away from running a capital-intensive subscription video business while retaining a foothold in the global sports-streaming ecosystem.
What emerges from the annual report is a company that has become more selective about where it wants to compete. In practice, News Corp is retreating from the economics of “general entertainment distribution” and leaning harder into products where it can charge for scarcity: proprietary data, specialist knowledge, or high-intent marketplace access.
The portfolio is splitting into “growth infrastructure” and “managed news”
To see the shape of News Corp in 2025, it helps to look at the segments side-by-side. Dow Jones and Digital Real Estate are not just large, they are increasingly the structural stabilisers of the group. News Media remains vast in reach, but its revenue base is shrinking and its profitability is being preserved through cost discipline rather than expansion.
Segment performance (FY2025)
| Segment | Revenue | Segment EBITDA | Key direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dow Jones | $2.331bn | $588m | subscription + B2B data scaling |
| Digital Real Estate Services | $1.802bn | $601m | marketplace profit engine |
| Book Publishing | $2.149bn | $296m | IP + backlist-heavy stability |
| News Media | $2.170bn | $153m | revenue down, EBITDA up via cuts |
Two things stand out. First, Digital Real Estate produces the highest segment EBITDA, a reminder that News Corp’s most profitable “media” products are not news at all, but property platforms. Second, News Media contributes the least EBITDA of the major reportable segments, despite being among the largest by revenue. In other words: the newspapers and related outlets still generate substantial turnover, but the cash is increasingly made elsewhere.
Dow Jones: subscription journalism, but also regulatory infrastructure
Dow Jones is the clearest proof that News Corp can build durable digital economics when the product has pricing power. Its consumer subscription base is now measured in millions: total consumer subscriptions across WSJ, Barron’s Group and IBD averaged 6.261m in the June 2025 quarter; WSJ alone averaged 4.538m, with 4.126m digital-only. That scale is paired with a shift toward enterprise value: Dow Jones’s professional portfolio, especially Risk & Compliance, is positioned not merely as content but as operational tooling for sanctions screening, financial crime compliance, geopolitical risk intelligence and reputational monitoring.
This is where News Corp looks most “AI-ready”, not because it is automating journalism, but because it is selling structured information and decision-support into environments where errors are costly and regulation is tightening. The company is explicit that these businesses face competition from Reuters, RELX/LexisNexis, Refinitiv and other data providers, including emerging AI-powered services. The subtext is that the moat is no longer only editorial reputation; it is data depth, workflow integration and compliance dependence.
Digital Real Estate: a marketplace that behaves like a utility
REA Group and Move/Realtor.com are often described as “adjacent” to News Corp, but the 10-K reads more like a thesis on why marketplaces are the modern media conglomerate’s best hedge. REA’s flagship site realestate.com.au averaged 132.2m monthly visits and 12.1m people visiting each month, with users visiting it “4.0 times more” than the nearest competitor. These audience metrics indicate habitual, high-intent usage, and that translates into pricing power over agents and developers through listing hierarchies, subscriptions, and add-on products.
Book Publishing: “backlist economics” quietly strengthening
HarperCollins is often treated as steady but unexciting. The report suggests something more strategic: an IP engine becoming more resilient as digital formats expand. In FY2025, digital sales represented ~24% of consumer revenues (up from 23%), while backlist sales accounted for ~64% of consumer revenue, up from 61% the year before. That backlist shift indicates a growing share of revenue coming from a long-lived catalogue rather than a short-lived hit cycle, smoothing volatility and improving predictability.
The report links digital growth to audiobook demand and the Spotify partnership (which has expanded availability across multiple markets). In a portfolio sense, publishing is functioning as the group’s “slow compounding” business: less dramatic than real estate, less headline-driven than news, but increasingly stable.
News Media: shrinking revenues, rising EBITDA
The News Media segment is where News Corp’s strategic tension becomes visible. In FY2025, segment revenue fell $100m (–4%) to $2.17bn. Advertising declined –5% and circulation/subscription slipped –1%. Yet segment EBITDA rose 15% to $153m.
This is a cost story. The report attributes the EBITDA increase to “cost savings initiatives,” including lower Talk costs and the combination of News UK printing operations with DMG Media. At the same time, “Other” revenues fell sharply (–18%), driven largely by the transfer of third-party printing revenue contracts into that joint venture arrangement. The move may make operational sense, but it also underlines how the segment is being financially stabilised by restructuring the industrial base of print rather than by growing digital monetisation.
The most under-noticed disclosure: algorithm risk is now a financial line item
One sentence in the MD&A is unusually frank: News UK’s digital advertising decline was “driven by a decline in traffic, mainly at The Sun, due to algorithm changes at certain platforms.” This is effectively an admission that platform visibility has become a material determinant of revenue. Elsewhere, the risk language deepens: large digital platforms “command a substantial share” of digital advertising and also deliver “a significant amount of traffic”; visibility depends on algorithms “outside the Company’s control” and changes have “adversely affected traffic… particularly in the U.K.”
In plain terms: News Corp’s mass-market news economics are exposed to platform governance in a way the Dow Jones subscription model is not. That exposure is not merely about distribution; it affects advertiser spend and therefore cash generation.
A small narrative clue with big implications: “The California Post”
Buried in the CEO letter is a revealing ambition: after a decade of “phenomenal expansion in reach” at the New York Post, management signals a plan to launch The California Post, a Los Angeles-based masthead, in early 2026.
Why does this matter? Because it suggests News Corp still believes there is room for brand extension in mass-market news, but the logic is more likely audience scale and influence than immediate profitability. It is difficult to read the News Media segment financials and conclude that new mastheads are a growth strategy in the conventional sense. The more plausible interpretation is that the company views certain tabloids as scalable attention assets, potentially monetised through new mixes (subscriptions, licensing, partnerships, events, and whatever “principled technology platforms” refers to in the letter).
So what is News Corp becoming?
The FY2025 annual report, read carefully, describes a company that is no longer trying to “save newspapers” with advertising-led digital transformation. Instead, it is building a portfolio where the most scalable units are those that monetise transactions, compliance dependence, and subscription necessity. The newspapers remain, and may remain important for influence and political leverage, but the financial centre of gravity has shifted.
If you want the simplest characterisation of News Corp in 2025, it is this:
- Dow Jones is becoming a hybrid of elite subscription journalism and enterprise risk infrastructure.
- Digital Real Estate behaves like a market utility with pricing power and data services.
- HarperCollins is strengthening its “catalogue economics,” with rising backlist weight and digital share.
- News Media is being managed through cost control while facing platform-driven volatility that the company now explicitly names.
In that sense, FY2025 is less a story of record profitability than of strategic sorting: News Corp is choosing which parts of its empire are built for the next decade, and which parts will survive mainly by being made cheaper to run.
Data source: News Corporation Annual Report on Form 10-K, fiscal year ended June 30, 2025.