James Murdoch, the beneficiary of an extra $1.1 billion thanks to a settlement that extricated himself from his older brother and father’s News Corp and Fox empires, may getting back in to the media game in a big way.
The younger Murdoch is said to be in talks with Vox Media about buying New York magazine and Vox podcast division assets, Rupert Murdoch’s own crown jewel broadsheet The Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources. A rep for James declined to comment on the story from the paper, which said the deal could still fall apart.
Ever since exiting his perch as CEO of 21st Century Fox after most of its assets were sold to Disney in a $71.3 billion deal in 2019, Murdoch has focused his efforts on building up his venture company Lupa Systems. His firm has taken a stake in the owner of Art Baselas well as Tribeca Enterprises, which puts on the Tribeca Film Festival, among other assets.
Buying New York would be more akin to being a steward to one of the magazine world’s last standing giants — and it’s a publication that was also owned by his father for a 15-year run until Rupert’s News Corp divested of its holdings in 1991 sale. (Murdoch bought the New York Post the same year as he bought New York mag, and held on to it — the tabloid is considered one of Rupert’s favorite papers.) So there’s a Succession and media dynasty element to the potential deal as well.
New York, in its latest incarnation, has been owned by Vox Media since 2019, when the new media publisher picked up the venerable mag from Pamela Wasserstein, the daughter of investment banker Bruce Wasserstein, who had owned the publication since 2004. (Penske Media, the owner of The Hollywood Reporter, also has a stake in Vox Media as part of a 2023 deal announced by Bankoff and PMC owner Jay Penske.)
If a deal closes, Murdoch would be vaulted more prominently into the world of billionaires who own a single, influential news outlet, like Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post or Laurene Powell Jobs’ at The Atlantic or Marc Benioff at Time magazine or Patrick Soon-Shiong with The Los Angeles Times. Most of those owners could be considered a vanity media owners. Most have, at one point, invested in the long-term growth of those properties and a few have since retrenched and cut costs. By contrast, James Murdoch has the bank account of a vanity owner but has had a long career as a media operator.
Despite his role as the heir to a famously swash-buckling, conservative-leaning media empire comprised of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and New York Post among its TV and publishing assets, James has studiously distanced himself from his older brother Lachlan’s politics and positioned himself as a centrist, donating to climate change non-profits and Democrat-leaning causes.
He’s also now left a brutal legal battle over control of his family business in the past. In a surprise settlement revealed last September, James along with siblings Prudence MacLeod and Elisabeth Murdoch agreed to take major buy outs of their voting shares in Fox and News Corp, effectively handing the keys to Rupert’s kingdom to his eldest son Lachlan in exchange for one billion-plus dollars each.
The Jim Bankoff-led Vox Media, the current owner of New York, is one of the last remaining new media companies that came of age during a time when BuzzFeed, Mashable, Mic and HuffPost led the way in the 2010s’ scale game to acquire tens of millions of readers monthly through maximizing distribution on social media.
First Facebook turned the traffic spigot off and then AI-generated summaries turned away readers who may have clicked over from Google. New York mag, if adding in its offshoot verticals like Vulture and The Cut, draws nearly 10 million visitors as of March, per Comscore. That puts the property far ahead of, say, most regional monthly magazines but far below nationally-focused newspapers that draw around 40 million uniques like, say, the Post or the Journal.
But many publishers have been moving beyond the traffic game, and New York is one of the most iconic titles at actual newsstands (yes, plenty still exist in the City), with a loyal base of print subscribers, as well as a foothold in events and more.
Vox Media, also the owner of Eater, The Verge, SB Nation as well as its explainer site Vox, has been speculated to be considering splitting off its publishing assets from its podcast assets (it’s the home of Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway’s Pivot show). The thinking being that suitors who may be interested in running the publishing assets will be operating a different media playbook than the podcasts, some of which have boomed in the video podcast era.