Shareholders attended a special meeting at the media company’s New York headquarters early Tuesday where they voted in favor of the formation of two separate companies. The larger company, 21st Century Fox, will include Fox Broadcasting, cable channels like Fox News and FX, and the Hollywood studio; a newly formed News Corporation will contain newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, the HarperCollins publishing company and a handful of Australian television assets.
Investors have for years grumbled that many of News Corporation’s more than 120 newspapers were a drag on the company, in contrast to the strong performance of its cable television assets. Those complaints became more pronounced in July 2011 when a phone hacking scandal erupted at the company’s British newspaper division, prompting the chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, to abruptly close News of the World, one of News Corporation’s most profitable papers.
“With the split of our company, and the birth of the new News Corp., I have been given the extraordinary opportunity most people never get in their lifetime: the chance to do it all over again,” Mr. Murdoch told investors at a News Corporation investor day held May 28.
The vote on Tuesday was partly a foregone conclusion. The Murdoch family controls 39.4 percent of the company’s Class B voting shares. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia controls another 7 percent and typically votes in support of the Murdoch family.
Representatives from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, a charitable organization and institutional investor that owns 3,686 Class B voting shares, on Tuesday protested the dual-class stock structure that allows the Murdoch family to control voting. That structure will also exist in both 21st Century Fox and the new News Corporation.
The company is expected to split officially on June 28.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/business/media/shareholders-approve-plan-to-split-news-corp.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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