February 14, 2023: -On Thursday, News Corp. said it would cut 1,250 positions, or 5% of its workforce, in the recent round of layoffs that have reached the media and tech industries in the last months.

Rupert Murdoch’s media company, which owns names like The New York Post, and HarperCollins, stated that the challenging macroeconomic environment and increased interest rates have been hurting the firm.

The company reported earnings results on Thursday and said its quarterly revenue came down 7% to $2.52 billion from before year period. Media firms, particularly digital media, have been trying to contend with a challenging advertising market.

“Just as our company passed the stress test of the coronavirus with record profits, the initiatives underway, which include an anticipated 5 per cent headcount less than, or nearly 1,250 positions this calendar year, creating a robust platform for increase,” CEO Robert Thomson stated in the earnings release on Thursday.

Thomson noted that despite “the obvious challenges of the world,” its professional information business at Dow Jones, the publisher of the Journal, experienced a revenue surge. Quarterly earnings for the overall Dow Jones segment increased 11% from the year-earlier period.

In the previous month, Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch were known of the proposed merger amid News Corp. and Fox Corp. after stating “a combination is not optimal for shareholders” of different firms.

The withdrawn proposal is coming as News Corp. has been in serious talks to sell its stake in Move Inc., the parent firm of Realtor.com, to commercial real estate firm CoStar Group. The company said Thursday it was still connected in those discussions.