Word: murdochs
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...Murdoch, who built his News Corp. empire on sensation-mongering tabloids, still loves to exert leverage and shake things up. In Britain earlier this month, critics charged that his cuts in the newsstand price of the staid London Times and the tabloid Sun were predatory moves to drive rivals out of business, which he denies. In New York City, angry employees threatened to shut down the bankrupt Post, which Murdoch owned from 1976 to 1988 and began running again last April in preparation for repurchasing it and rescuing it from collapse. The employee threat was prompted by management demands...
...began, it was Murdoch's ventures themselves that seemed shaken up. After a rash of acquisitions ranging from TV stations and printing presses to TV Guide magazine, News Corp. found itself with $9.5 billion of high- interest debt. That burden, compounded by a worldwide economic downturn, dealt the company a $308 million loss in 1991. To pare down the debt, Murdoch sold $1.2 billion of stock and spun off such assets as the Daily Racing Form, Seventeen and New York magazine. The moves still left News Corp. with $7.5 billion in IOUs but helped it record a profit...
...sooner did Murdoch lighten his debt load than he began running again. The acquisition of STAR TV, which can reach an Asian audience of 13 million, potentially brings two-thirds of mankind within his direct-to-the-home satellite grasp. To help finance the deal, Murdoch is selling his 50% stake in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, one of the world's most profitable papers...
...Murdoch is taking another leap in the dark with his acquisition of Delphi, whose 50,000 subscribers make it the smallest of the five leading U.S. providers of online services to households. Among other things, Murdoch wants to offer an electronic newspaper "where you'll be able to pull up something on a screen that looks like the front page of a paper" -- a longtime goal of the online industry. At the same time, technological advances could permit Delphi to transmit video images and voices into the vast Internet system...
Nowhere is Murdoch rushing ahead more rapidly than in Europe, where his expansion of BSkyB is part of a slew of new ventures. Partners include Britain's National Transcommunication Ltd., a research facility that will help him develop video compression, and Cellnet, a cellular-phone firm that will team up with British Telecom to work on Murdoch's electronic superhighway. At the same time, Murdoch is joining forces with German TV broadcaster PRO 7 to provide and manage satellite channels reaching 100 million potential viewers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, starting next January...