News Corp Revenue Slips

News Corp reported slightly lower revenue amid a softening advertising market, despite continued growth at Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones & Co.

The New York-based media company, which owns the Journal, HarperCollins Publishers and news organizations in the U.K. and Australia, said revenue fell 1.8% to $2.45 billion for the quarter ended March 31. Net profit declined 39% to $50 million, or nine cents a share, from $82 million, or 14 cents a share, a year earlier.

“In a period in which advertising was clearly insipid in certain parts of the world, our core non-advertising revenue has been particularly robust,” Chief Executive Robert Thomson said.

Ad revenue across units decreased 6% to $393 million, which Chief Financial Officer Susan Panuccio said was partly due to lower ad spending by technology and financial companies.

Robert Thompson

During a call with investors Thursday to discuss the company’s results, Thomson expressed his concern about the impact of generative artificial intelligence on News Corp’s intellectual property and the future of journalism. He called for compensation for the use of IP for training AI engines, the content that is surfaced in user queries and answers that are monetized by other parties when articles are aggregated and synthesized.  

“We expect our fair share of that monetization,” he said. “Generative AI cannot be degenerative AI.”

News Corp a quarter ago announced that it expected to reduce head count by 5% this year. On Thursday, Mr. Thomson said the plan would yield at least $160 million in annualized savings by year-end.  

The only News Corp unit to report revenue and profit growth in the quarter was Dow Jones, the publisher of the Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch. The unit posted an 8.6% rise in revenue to $529 million, boosted in part by the acquisitions of information-services businesses OPIS and CMA. Segment earnings at Dow Jones rose 24% to $109 million.

The Journal averaged 3.299 million digital subscriptions in the period, an increase of 132,000 from the previous quarter. Including the print edition, the Journal averaged about 3.888 million subscriptions in the period. Total average subscriptions to all Dow Jones consumer products reached 5.117 million, or 174,000 more than in the previous quarter.

News Corp’s other news publications—which include the New York Post, the Sun and the Times in the U.K., and many papers in Australia—reported a 2.9% decrease in revenue, and a 13% drop in segment earnings. 

Thomson also noted that Thursday marked the 44th day in captivity for Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, “who has been wrongfully, willfully detained in Russia. We trust that justice and common sense will prevail, and that Evan will soon be released.”