The CEO and founder of youth media site The Tab recently had a high-stakes meeting with one of the most powerful media owners on the planet.

But rather than rehearsing his lines, finessing a slideshow or working out strategies to charm News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch, Jack Rivlin spent the preceding weekend at Glastonbury.

When he showed up the following morning at Murdoch's British HQ, the glass-clad News Building by London Bridge, Rivlin was still picking glitter out of his hair, wearing borrowed shoes, and nursing a hangover.

None of this prevented him, alongside co-founder George Marangos-Gilks, from securing Murdoch's backing as the lead investor in a £4.5 million ($6 million) round of funding announced this week.

The money will help hire more staff and bolster The Tab's network of youth-focused sites, which consist of volunteer campus editions in the US and UK, professional staff in London and New York, and a women's sub-section called babe.

In an interview with Business Insider, Rivlin described how he won Murdoch over by appealing to his credentials as a news man, showing him a book of cuttings filled with print-outs of Tab stories that made a big splash.

They included an exclusive story that Malia Obama was headed for Harvard, and in the UK damning footage of a Cambridge student setting a £20 note on fire in front of a homeless man.

During the US presidential election Tab reporters reported extensively on Bernie Sanders' increasing popularity with young people, and managed to get an answer out of then-candidate Donald Trump at a campaign event.

In the UK, The Tab got exclusive access to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, convinced David Cameron to write an article for them, and became the stars of an embarrassing photo op with Ed Miliband.

Rivlin said: "Rather than going in with a slide deck I wanted to show what makes us really unique. I printed out all the big scoops we’d done over the last couples of years and slapped that on their desk — it was Rupert Murdoch, [News Corp CEO] Robert Thompson and [News UK COO] David Dinsmore."

"They loved it, we shook on investment after 45 minutes.

"We came straight out of Glastonbury and had left the day before. I had to borrow some shoes from my friend’s dad, we still had glitter on us. It’s just about the only time I've ironed a shirt."

Rivlin declined to specify how much Murdoch's News Corp invested, but said they were the lead in a £4.5 million round made up of several investors.

The latest round means Tab Media, the site's UK-based parent company, has taken a total of £7.63 million ($10 million) of private investment.

He said the attraction of his website — as opposed to other "millennial" outlets — is that the content is written by people who really understand their audience, because they are the same age as them.

He said: "The average age is 23, for our editorial staff. [Campus editors and reporters are younger.] If you put those guys in charge it’s chaotic and you get something pretty unvarnished. It also helps that they're always up for a scrap."

Full disclosure: I edited a campus edition of the Tab as a student in 2012, and am no longer involved.

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• Australian-born billionaire Rupert Murdoch, 87, helms a media empire made up of newspapers like The Wall Street Journal, television networks like Fox News, and a handful of other publications across the world. 
• Murdoch inherited his very first newspaper from his father, who was a war reporter turned publisher. 
• Bloomberg estimates his net worth to be $19 billion, as of March 2019. 

Rupert Murdoch's name is one synonymous with media, but it took decades to build his sprawling empire.

He owns dozens upon dozens of newspapers spanning 3 continents, founded the Fox network — responsible for revolutionizing cable television to what it is today — in the 1980s, and has a net worth $19 billion. That makes him the 47th-richest person in the world.

Forbes describes his wealth as self-made, but Murdoch has been interested in media ever since his dad, Keith, left him a string of Australian newspapers when he was just 22 years old. 

He then grew his network of papers into a multibillion-dollar domain, cementing his name as a magnate in the industry. The 87-year-old plans to do the same as his father — Murdoch is handing off the reigns of 21st Century Fox, among his other corporations, to his sons to continue the tradition. 

Over the span of his five-decade career, Murdoch has been in four marriages and has six kids. He's also been the subject of variety of scandals, most prominently when his UK-based paper News of the World was forced to shutter after it was found to have hacked the phone of a slain teenager.

Take a look at how Murdoch got his start, the deals he has made, and the growth of his empire.

SEE ALSO: Meet the 15 richest American family 'dynasties,' who have a combined net worth of $618 billion

Rupert Murdoch graduated from Oxford University, then known as Worcester College, in 1952.

His father, Sir Keith Murdoch, a war reporter turned publisher, died the same year, and Murdoch went back to Australia to take over the family business at the age of 22.

Source: BBC News

Murdoch, seen here in 1960, inherited a chain of Australian newspapers from his father. According to Bloomberg, Murdoch embedded himself in all matters of production, from writing copy to managing the printer and redesigning page layouts.

He especially made it a priority to include "lurid stories and scandals," which made paper sales boom. He began buying other publications, including The Daily Mirror and the Perth Sunday Times.

Source: Bloomberg

Murdoch then went on to found Australia's first nationwide newspaper, The Australian, in 1964. Unlike Murdoch's other papers, it is not a tabloid.

Murdoch then founded News Corporation, known as News Corp, which owns more than 170 papers in Australia. 

Source: BBC News

• The Wall Street Journal said it hit a record 2.6 million paid subscribers—and has ambitions to keep growing.
• The publisher's CMO Suzi Watford said the Journal is trying to reach price-sensitive people by offering "less for less."
• That includes joining Apple News Plus, the phone maker's $10-a-month subscription service.
• Despite naysayers saying Plus would cannibalize the Journal, Watford said Plus "hasn't had much of an impact" on core Journal subscriptions.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

While The New York Times keeps cranking out subscription gains, The Wall Street Journal is bragging that it's hit a record 2.6 million paid subscribers — and that it's got big ambitions to keep growing.

News Corp's Journal reported it hit 2.6 million paid subscribers in the first three months of 2019, a record number. Of those, 1.8 million were digital-only, a 19% increase over a year ago.

Read more:The New York Times has more subs than ever. That's not necessarily good news for the rest of the industry.

The Journal, along with the Times, has been increasingly relying on subscription growth as advertising growth tapers off. But the question is how big the subscriptions market will be. 16% pay for online news in the US, according to Reuters Institute research, and the Journal is traditionally thought of as being for business professionals, at a regular price of $468 a year for all-digital access. 

Suzi Watford, CMO of the Journal, said the Journal is making a push for people who are price-sensitive. The Journal is doing this is by joining Apple News Plus, the phone maker's new $10-a-month all-you-can-read subscription service. The Journal also has a deal launching in June with Twitter to distribute several videos a day for free.

"We want to make sure we're getting out to as broad an audience as possible," she told Business Insider.

Industry insiders thought Apple News Plus might cannibalize the Journal's pricier subscription business. Watford said it's too soon to tell how many people are reading the Journal through Apple News Plus, which gives you access to hundreds of publications for $10 a month; most people signed up for the four-week free trial period, which ended in late April. But she said the impact on Journal subs has been minimal and emphasized that the Apple News readership is more female and general news-focused.

"We're very comfortable—it hasn't had much of an impact on the core business," she said. "It is a very different experience reading the Wall Street Journal on Apple News versus reading it on our platform."

The Journal is chasing younger readers with content created just for them

The Journal also is stepping up its marketing to college students and other young readers. It's created a "young audience" team to develop content aimed at people just starting their careers and has produced such stories as ones on the popularity of therapy among millennials; why that generation isn't buying homes; and how young people should ask for a promotion.

The Journal is also trying to grow the high end of the market, with specialized newsletters for professionals that can run into the thousands of dollars a year. A subscription to WSJ Pro Bankruptcy costs $4,800 a year and includes daily emails, special reports, and a website, for example. WSJ Pro Central Banking costs $2,000 for a daily email and special reports. The Journal wouldn't say how many subscribers these products have.

It's also trying to improve the experience for existing subscribers, by limiting commenting to paying subscribers, for one thing. Watford calls this overall strategy of giving subscribers more and giving nonsubscribers some access "more for more, less for less."

The Times is still ahead with 4.5 million subscriptions

The approach is similar to that of The Times, which has been rolling out paid lifestyle products like Cooking, Crosswords and Parenting to lure new readers and also looking to increase prices for the core product. The Times has 4.5 million subscriptions, including 3.6 million digital subs, a 29% increase versus a year ago, and has a goal of reaching 10 million subs by 2025.

Dow Jones, to which the Journal belongs, hit a previously announced target of 3 million subs last May; it hasn't announced a new goal. But Watford said she sees more room to grow, and in a different way from the Times.

"There's no shortage of ambition, given the pace at which we've grown," Watford said. "I think of what we're doing as being slightly different from what The New York Times is doing, whether it's around premium price, professionals, new audiences. It's less lifestyle and leisure and more professional services."

Still, it's a question of whether the Journal can get nonsubscribers to ever pay full price. On the high end, the risk is that people are already saturated with content and that going wide will dilute the Journal's reputation as an authority for business readers.

Michael Silberman, SVP at Piano, a paywall technology company, said he doesn't see competition for people's wallet as much of an issue as their attention. "There's only so much time in the day," he said.

Watford conceded the Journal still has work to do in hooking people who may not think of themselves as traditional Journal readers while still being true to its brand.

"We also have to work on that and the perception that the Journal has something for them," she said. "The way we see the world through this lens of business and technology, that hasn't gone away. The Journal at its best is its tool that helps people make decisions about their careers, everyday decisions about their finances. Students are looking at that life-stage content. The more we can build on that, the better."

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NOW WATCH: Mount Everest is not the hardest mountain to climb — here's what makes K2 so much worse

• News Corp — the mass media company, which owns publications like The Wall Street Journal and The Times — will reportedly launch 'Knewz,' a news aggregation site, later this year. 
• The decision comes as News Corp's executives have become increasingly concerned about how existing platforms, like Google News and Facebook, surface content for its readers. 
• Knowledge of the Knewz project was first reported by The Journal on Thursday. 
• Knewz will pull articles from hundreds of news sources, including prominent publications like The New York Times, while also highlighting work by smaller outlets, regardless of political leanings. 
• Knewz.com will also elevate an original story over aggregation pieces, and it will not ding articles requiring a subscription from gaining exposure, the report said. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

News Corp — the company behind publications like The Wall Street Journal and The Times — will reportedly launch Knewz, an online news aggregation platform later this year. It's apparently an attempt to address its executives' concerns with how existing platforms, like Google News and Facebook, surface content for readers. 

Knowledge of the project was first reported by The Journal on Thursday. 

According to the report, the aggregation site will pull articles from hundreds of news sources, including prominent publications like The New York Times, while also highlighting work by smaller outlets — something News Corp executives believe services like Google News and Facebook's social feed don't handle adequately. 

Those smaller outlets will include conservative-leaning sites like the Daily Wire, the Daily Caller, and the Washington Examiner, sources told the Journal. But the project isn't an attempt to only prop up right-leaning outlets. Liberal publications like the Daily Kos and ThinkProgress are among the less-mainstream sites that could see more exposure, the report said. 

Knewz will also elevate an original story over aggregation pieces, and it will not ding articles for requiring a subscription from gaining exposure on its site, according to the report. The Journal said that in 2017, Google ended its policy of downgrading articles from subscription news services, in part as a result of pushback from News Corp executives. 

"We are exploring this with the goal of recognizing and rewarding the provenance of journalism, and to drive traffic and data to publishers - including subscription sites - so their original work is respected," a News Corp spokesperson told Business Insider on Thursday. "We want people to see a wide spectrum of news and views, from local, niche and national sources, without bent or bias." 

Meanwhile, it's not totally clear how much News Corp may have kept its fellow media titans in the know on Knewz: While the Journal's report indicates that NBC will have its content aggregated on Knewz, NBC News' Dylan Byers said on Twitter that the NBC News Group's head of digital told him that "we have never heard of 'Knewz' and do not plan on participating in a platform with that name."

The report comes as conservative lawmakers in the US, including President Donald Trump, have become increasingly critical of Silicon Valley tech companies, especially Google, who they say have introduced political bias into their products. In June, President Trump said that Google and Facebook should be sued for being "totally biased." More recently, on Monday, Trump tweeted about a two-year-old study that claimed Hillary Clinton could have received millions of votes in the 2016 presidential election as a result of bias in the way Google ranked its search results. 

Read more:The new report that Trump says shows Google 'manipulated' 2.6 million votes for Hillary Clinton is a 2-year-old study that a San Diego psychologist based on 95 people

A Google spokesperson said that the researcher's claims were "inaccurate" and that its "goal is to always provide people with access to high quality, relevant information for their queries, without regard to political viewpoint."

SEE ALSO: Google pushed an exception through to allow US Customs and Border Protection to try a key cloud product free, even as 1,300 Google employees protest any work with the agency

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The incredible story behind Slack, the app that's taken over offices everywhere

• The ad-tech firm Polar said it's built a solution to help struggling online publishers by beating Facebook at its own game.
• It built tech that uses an advertiser's social creative for ads on publisher pages and says they outperform traditional banner ads and Facebook itself.
• The hope is that the success of these ads will get advertisers to shift some of their spending from Google and Facebook, which have been vacuuming up digital-ad dollars, to the publishers.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Big media companies are struggling for their survival as Google and Facebook gobble up most of the digital-advertising pie.

Polar, an ad-tech company, says part of the problem is that the ad creative on Facebook is just way better than standard web ads because they're so visual and interactive. So it built a format called Social Display, which basically takes an advertiser's Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter creative and repurposes it for web ads, and it says they perform better than publisher's traditional ads and Facebook itself.

Read more:The Information has tapped Spotify and BuzzFeed execs as it looks to double its business team

Polar made the tech available to the rest of its publisher clients starting this year after an exclusivity period with News Corp. and Verizon Media.

Since then, 120 Polar clients, including Bloomberg, Vox Media, and NBCUniversal have sold the product to 1,500 advertisers across 2,500 campaigns, Kunal Gupta, CEO of Polar, said. 

• The pitch to publishers is that these ads can solve banner blindness and make their display ads more compelling to users, and hence, advertisers.
• For advertisers, the pitch is that they can create these ads with no extra work or cost to their Facebook ads.

"Banner ads have been ignored by users but also by advertisers — they haven't invested in the format," Gupta said. "The advertisers love the idea of, you build it once and reuse it. So we engineered a solution where the advertiser doesn't have to spend more money."

Polar says its ad format outperforms old-fashioned banner ads

Polar said that across those 2,500 campaigns, the engagement rate — 0.6% — is far higher than that of standard banner ads. (The rates vary by industry, but Google has estimated click-through rates for banner ads to be as low as an abysmal 0.05%.)

Polar also says its Social Display ads have an average view time of nine seconds — compared to the 1.7 seconds Facebook says its users spend with a piece of content on mobile and 2 1/2 seconds on desktop.

Gupta hopes results like that will get advertisers to shift some of their Facebook ad budgets to publishers.

Social Display is a "significant opportunity" to shift back some of the ads going to social platforms, according to Steve Sottile, the president for North America at the social-video-ad platform Unruly, whose parent, News Corp., helped develop the ad format.

Mike Rucker, the creative director of NBC News Brand Studio at NBCUniversal, said users were interacting with the ads far more often than they were with standard display ads. He speculated that's because people scroll more slowly on NBCUniversal's sites than they do on social media, and the sociallike format stands out.

"There's no denying the big dogs are getting more of the pie, so there's a growing sense of urgency for brands in how to capture attention and for publishers to retain and reclaim those dollars," he said.

Social Display ads don't solve other publisher problems, though

It's tempting to think old-media companies could thrive by beating Facebook at its own game. But there are other obstacles keeping publishers from shaking loose advertising from Facebook.

• Even if the ads perform well, publishers can't compete with Facebook on scale, audience, and targeting.
• The Social Display ads are suited to advertisers that need to drive awareness but less so to performance-focused marketers. 
• Publishers have to fight inertia from ad agencies and marketers who are entrenched in habitual ways of buying media.
• Publishers also might have to deal with turf wars between competing agency teams that might both lay claim to buying such ads.
• Plus, there could be resistance from agency staffers who make banner ads and could find themselves displaced by the new ad format.

Marcus Witte, the senior vice president of business practices at Cadreon, IPG Mediabrand's ad-tech unit, said Social Display was an easy way for advertisers to extend their social campaigns, and the units perform well, but they're limited to the number of publishers running them. "You can't get millions of impressions," he said.

SEE ALSO: Facebook is hiring a team of journalists to staff its news tab but will rely mostly on algorithms

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• News Corp. has tapped Viacom's outgoing tech chief, David Kline, to be its next chief technology officer, the company confirmed to Business Insider on Monday.
• Kline is set to leave Viacom after its merger with CBS closes on December 4. He joins News Corp. in January.
• The publisher's current chief technology officer, Marc Frons, is leaving the company at the end of 2019.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

News Corp. has tapped Viacom's outgoing tech chief, David Kline, to be its next chief technology officer, the company confirmed to Business Insider on Monday.

Kline is set to leave Viacom after its merger with CBS closes on December 4. He joins News Corp. in January.

The publisher's current chief technology officer, Marc Frons, is leaving at the end of 2019, News Corp. said. The company did not elaborate on a reason for Frons' departure.

Frons, who spent four years at News Corp., rose to chief technology officer in 2017 after serving as interim CTO and senior vice president and global head of mobile platform and deputy head of technology.

He previously spent nine years at The New York Times, in roles including chief information officer and chief technology officer of digital. Frons also worked at Dow Jones and was a reporter at publications including Businessweek and Newsweek.

His departure comes as Rupert Murdoch's publishing empire, like other newspaper publishers, has leaned on digital advertising and subscriptions to cover losses in its print business. Last quarter, News Corp. profits dipped amid fiercer competition for online readers and advertising, Forbes reported.

The company has been looking to expand its online footprint by launching a digital version of its UK-based tabloid The Sun in the US, among other efforts, Vanity Fair reported.

Kline — who had been with Viacom for nine years — is one of a number of top execs at Viacom who will be leaving the company after its merger with CBS closes in December. 

His departure was revealed earlier last month and reported by the trade publication Broadcasting & Cable.

In addition to holding the chief technology officer role at Viacom, Kline was previously Discovery's chief information officer.

"David Kline is expert at driving innovation and efficiency in businesses that distribute quality content worldwide," Robert Thomson, the CEO of News Corp., said in a statement. "He is the ideal person to take the baton from Marc Frons, who has ably and thoughtfully been leading the technological transformation of News Corp since his arrival four years ago. We have robust global shared technology services and are rapidly establishing efficient platforms for everything from security and data to mobile apps."

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NOW WATCH: Behind the scenes with Shepard Smith — the Fox News star who just announced his resignation from the network

Hello! Welcome to the Advertising and Media Insider newsletter. I'm Tanya Dua, a senior advertising reporter filling in for Lucia this week. If you got this email forwarded, sign up for your own here. Send tips or feedback to me at tdua@businessinsider.com.

First, a scoop from my colleague Ashley Rodriguez. WarnerMedia Entertainment plans to cut more than two dozen marketing and international sales jobs next year as it reorganizes under AT&T.

A new round of layoffs will hit WarnerMedia Entertainment's marketing and international sales teams starting early next year

Ashley also had the details on News Corp's new tech chief. Viacom CTO David Kline, who will be exiting the company when it completes its merger with CBS, will become CTO of News Corp.

News Corp. has tapped Viacom's former tech chief as its next CTO

If you were busy scarfing down turkey and stuffing last week, we've got you covered. Here's a quick recap of some key stories you may have missed.

Ownership of the ideas that an ad agency pitches to win a brand's business is an increasingly hot topic in the ad industry, Patrick Coffee reports. As they contend with shrinking profits and client contracts, some ad agencies are opting out of brands' increasingly demanding stipulations.

Many brands demand that their ad agencies give up intellectual-property rights — but some agencies are starting to push back

Lucia Moses caught up with the famous investor Fred Wilson, who talked about what venture capitalists got wrong about media and why he still sees opportunity in the sector.

Fred Wilson, one of the world's most successful venture capitalists, reveals the top trends in startups right now, and why he's investing in an industry that's imploding

He also revealed why he invested in John Heilemann and John Battelle's media startup, The Recount, which sums up the day's politics news in short clips.

Star venture capitalist Fred Wilson is betting $5 million the world needs another video media startup. He explains how The Recount could quickly become a profitable, $200 million business

Here are other great stories from media, marketing, and advertising. (You can read most of the articles here by subscribing to BI Prime; use promo code AD2PRIME2018 for a free month.) And send me tips at lmoses@businessinsider.com.

Internal memo reveals Sony Music's plans to double down on podcast ad sales strategy with four new executive hires

Marketing-tech company Sprinklr has acquired the social media business of one of Facebook's oldest marketing partners

People are confused by Peloton's new holiday ad, which shows a woman taking selfies while riding the bike over the course of a year

Podcast companies are using new tech to make more money from host-read ads, but some worry about overwhelming their most loyal listeners

Dive Studios is trying to turn K-Pop fans into podcast listeners by grabbing their attention on social media

How Kardashian drama helped 'Comments by Celebs' make the jump from Instagram to podcasting success

Starbucks baristas are celebrating as the coffee giant updates its dress code

How much money a YouTube video with 1 million views makes, according to 4 creators

Join the conversation about this story »

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• Mike Shields, the former advertising editor for Business Insider who is now CEO of Shields Strategic Consulting, lists the most game-changing advertising/media/marketing tech deals of the past decade.
• These include Disney acquiring Maker Studios for almost $1 billion in 2014; AOL acquiring The Huffington Post in 2011; and News Corp. acquiring Time Warner, among others.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Wow, there sure have been a lot of deals in the media industry. Just the other day, Rubicon and Telaria announced a merger. That was just weeks after Mastercard purchased SessionM and Disney bought some Fox assets.

But those are just mere transactions, footnotes in the digital evolution. Now, it's time to look back on the most game-changing advertising/media/marketing tech deals of the past decade. For the 2010s were about blockbuster bets and tectonic shifts:

1. 2014:Verizon acquires OnCue and soon sets off the streaming era with the launch of Go90. For a time, it would be hard to imagine streaming live NBA games and teen dramas with your crew on your phone — sideways — but now it's all we do. Think about it — there wouldn't be a Quibi without a Go90.
2. 2013:Publicis acquires Omnicom— the 2010s were about building a powerhouse marketing services team that had everything you'd ever want in one place. Mission accomplished. Or should I say, Mission Accompli! (This deal happened, right? At the time, it seemed very complicated, but who remembers.)
3. 2014:Disney acquires Maker Studios for almost $1 billion. A lot of people point to Bob Iger's deals for Marvel or Star Wars as major game changers. But it was this stealth acquisition that set the Mouse House on a course to dominate the lucrative MCN market and connected the company with family-friendly talent such as PewDiePie.
4. 2013:Yahoo acquires Tumblr for $1 billion. Many people pointed to then-CEO Marissa Mayer's decision to give users unlimited storage in Flickr as her most savvy move, but to me it was thrusting Yahoo into the social media stratosphere with Tumblr. Right now, it's hard to imagine a Baby Yoda meme not being Tumblr-ed to you, along with relevant targeted ads, but there was a time when this wasn't possible.
5. 2015 and 2017:Verizon acquires AOL and Yahoo to form Oath. It's been said that in digital marketing, data is the new oil. And while it's true that Verizon wasn't able to actually use its wireless data to target ads in the end, it was able to pivot Oath to a house of brands.
6. 2016:News Corp acquires Unruly Media for $176 million. If you've ever visited a local newspaper site, you recognize the elegance of out stream native video. Unruly brought the Murdoch family this in spades — so much so that they hired a bank earlier this year to see if they could flip it.
7. 2011:AOL acquires The Huffington Post for $315 million. The publisher, after inventing live news streaming, has proven to be a perfect fit inside new parent Verizon. Meanwhile, this deal set off a decade of perfectly reasonable digital media valuations.
8. 2018:Adobe acquires Marketo for $4.75 billion. At one point, both companies had offered marketers a dashboard where they could look at all their important numbers. Suddenly, brands had an even bigger dashboard with more columns.
9. 2013:ABC and Univision launch Fusion— was it a cable network for millennials? A website not aimed at Latinos? We may never know.
10. 2019:Chicken Soup for the Soul acquires Crackle. Netflix's US growth is slowing. Coincidence?
11. 2014:AT&T acquires DirecTV for $48.5 billion. As Dave Matthews once put it, "Satellite dish in my yard, tell me more, tell me more."
12. 2011:Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo team up to sell "class 2" inventory, kicking off a era of premium digital ad consortiums, including Brand.net, Pangea, Quadrant One, and too many others to list.
13. 2019:Vice Media acquires Refinery29. Not only were the cultures a perfect fit, but Refinery29's 29 Rooms art initiative appears to the perfect programming anchor for the Viceland cable network.
14. 2014:News Corp acquires Time Warner — Murdoch finally gets his cable empire, keeping the power center of this industry inside of traditional media.
15. 2017: NBCUniversal spends $230 million on a property called Craftsy. Seriously, this really happened.

SEE ALSO: NBCU and Comcast's new streaming service Peacock just isn't bold enough and they may lose the streaming wars. Here's what they should do instead.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How to find water when you're stuck in the desert

• Rupert Murdoch's son and daughter-in-law issued a sharp condemnation of Murdoch-owned publications, telling The Daily Beast they were disappointed in the climate-change denialism amid the deadly bushfire crisis in Australia.
• "Kathryn and James' views on climate are well established and their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well known," a spokesperson for the couple told The Daily Beast.
• The fires have destroyed millions of acres and are thought to have killed nearly one billion animals in recent weeks and months. Critics have seized on Murdoch-owned news publications, accusing them of fueling misinformation on the crisis.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The son of the global media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has issued a statement decrying coverage from News Corp and Fox News on the role climate change has played in the deadly Australian bushfires.

James Murdoch and his wife Kathryn Murdoch released a statement through a spokesperson condemning largely conservative, Murdoch-owned media outlets that have downplayed or avoided covering the effects of climate change.

"Kathryn and James' views on climate are well established and their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well known," the spokesperson told The Daily Beast. "They are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary."

The Australian bushfires have ripped through millions of acres and are thought to have killed an estimated one billion animals in recent weeks and months, while scientists and activists have sought to highlight the role climate change has played in the increasing temperatures and severe drought conditions across Australia.

News Corp Australia publications saturate the country's media market with more than 140 newspapers and 3,000 journalists, according to The Daily Beast. The news outlet reported that other members of the Murdoch family declined to comment on the issue.

But Kathryn and James Murdoch are not the only to speak out about News Corp's coverage of the bushfires. A recent analysis published in The New York Times found that Murdoch-owned news publications have propelled misinformation on the crisis, exaggerating the role arsonists played in the blazes and downplaying the effects of climate change.

Leaked emails from a News Corp Australia employee also revealed discontent within the company over its coverage of the crisis.

A commercial finance manager for the company, Emily Townsend, sent an all-staff email condemning the publications' "misinformation campaign."

"I find it unconscionable to continue working for this company, knowing I am contributing to the spread of climate change denial and lies," Townsend wrote. "The reporting I have witnessed in The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun is not only irresponsible, but dangerous and damaging to our communities and beautiful planet that needs us more than ever now to acknowledge the destruction we have caused and start doing something about it."

• Read more:
• Australia's bushfires are producing so much smoke that NASA expects it to travel all the way around the world and return to Australia
• Jeff Bezos is getting slammed for his donation of $690,000 to the Australian wildfire recovery, which is less than he made every 5 minutes in 2018
• Rupert Murdoch's News Corp criticized for misleading bushfire coverage amplified by trolls and bots
• Thousands of Australians are calling for their prime minster's resignation. He's vowed to keep exporting coal, despite the link between fires and climate change.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns explains why country music is universal

• Mike Shields, the former advertising editor for Business Insider who's now CEO of Shields Strategic Consulting, argues that advertisers who still spend with Fox News, even if they disagree with its content, aren't doing enough.
• Last week, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert instructed his team to pull its ads from Fox News host Tucker Carlson's show — but Fox simply moved the ads to a different show.
• Moves like these don't truly support the Black Lives Matter movement, Shields states, and only further contribute to Fox's multimillion-dollar ad revenue.
• "It's time for advertisers to boycott Fox News until it makes serious changes," Shields says.
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Last week, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert got a whole bunch of Twitter high fives for his epically brave dunk on Fox News host Tucker Carlson. 

Like many brands, T-Mobile has been publicly expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement with a flurry of public statements, gestures, and social media posts. When Sievert heard that Carlson had disparaged the movement, he instructed his team to pull T-Mobile ads from the show.

Bravo!

And then Fox News executives simply moved the T-Mobile ads to different shows on the network and kept T-Mobile's cash — and used it to keep programming the network and paying Carlson.

Thus T-Mobile accomplished — well, absolutely nothing. 

Ditto Papa John's and Disney. These presumably purpose-driven brands proved their true motivation — don't do anything unless there's a threat of bad PR. Then spin it to make yourself look good.

Here's the thing: If brands truly care about the Black community — whether we're talking about their employees or consumers — there's one bold but absolutely necessarily thing they must do.

Defund Fox News. Pull all of your ads — now.

Think that's going too far? Let's remember what Carlson said.

After calling Black Lives Matter supporters "soulless" and "craven," he opined that the string of protests throughout the US "may be a lot of things, this moment we're living through, but it is definitely not about Black lives. Remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will."

Consider what's going on in this country right now. The CrossFit CEO said he didn't see the point in mourning George Floyd, and he's out of his job. Carlson's remarks don't even warrant a suspension.

Let's be clear. Carlson didn't have a slip of the tongue or talk himself into a misunderstanding. He's not some crackpot like Alex Jones or Glenn Beck. He's a brilliant guy, and he knows exactly what he's doing.

Saying the protests are "definitely not about Black lives" serves to diminish Black people's motivations right off the bat. And the idea that "they are coming for you"— that's deliberately about trying to scare the hell out of viewers: The Black mob is on its way to your door. 

It's completely calculated, and it works. It fires up the Carlson audience that's already predisposed to hate, and preys on the gullible — people like my mom.

It's worth nothing that Carlson also continually refers to the protests as riots, which they are not. Did a few Targets get busted up early on? Sure. But these protests are massive, relentless, multicultural, and peaceful. I can say that because I've been to two. Carlson most definitely hasn't — and he's not a real reporter, so he wouldn't bother to find out.

His network has even admitted to ginning up footage of protests to make them look more violent and chaotic — only after it got called out. Again, these are not accidents.

So I'm sorry, but you can't just yank ads from a particular Fox show here or there when a host makes an objectionable comment to make yourself look and feel good, only to keep pumping money into the network.

And that you do.

According to Variety, Fox News' ad revenue jumped 15% earlier this year, and Carlson's show pulled in $33 million during the first quarter, up from $25 million last year. So a few brands moving their schedules around isn't exactly going to make the Murdoch family think about clipping any coupons.

"Tucker's warning about 'when they come for you' was clearly referring to Democratic leaders and politicians," a Fox News spokesperson said when Business Insider reached out for comment. "Fox News confirmed all national ads and revenue from Carlson's show have moved to other programs and Fox News hasn't lost any revenue overall."

Advertisers, this is an insidious organization that you continue to support. The list of disgraces is long, and we don't need to go into every one. But a few are worth mentioning:

• There's Laura Ingraham going after the Parkland kids — teenagers who'd been through a traumatic school shooting — over their grades.
• There's Carlson in 2018 saying that immigrants make the US "dirtier."
• There's Ingraham telling outspoken Black athletes like LeBron James to "shut up and dribble" while then speaking up for white QB Drew Brees to express his opinion on the protests.
• Let's not forget Fox's Sean Hannity pushing numerous conspiracy theories that even the network has had to push back on.
• And of course, there's Carlson saying that white supremacy isn't a problem in the US, despite a string of terror attacks and warnings from the US government on the growing danger.
• Last but not least, there's the whole network seeming to deny the coronavirus was a thing, and then strangely pushing a malaria drug for months that seems to have not worked, considering that 110,000-plus Americans are dead. (To be fair, Carlson back on January 28 did say that "the biggest story of the day, maybe of the moment, a potential pandemic rising from Asia.")

I could go and on and on. But my point is: CMOs, this is where your money goes. You can't have it both ways — you can't "pull" ads from shows here or there until the heat dies down while continually funding this organization. Your brand's money goes to the company that makes Carlson and Ingraham possible.

It's time for advertisers to boycott Fox News until it makes serious changes.

To be clear, the fact that Fox's coverage leans conservative, or pro-Trump or whatever isn't reason to cut advertising on the network. No one wants to censor a whole party here. I may not agree with it, but if you want to talk all day about how much you love tax cuts or small government, have at it. I've said this before: The runaway success of Fox News over the last 20 years shows that many mainstream news organizations had a blind spot when it came to conservative views.

But what these Fox hosts are doing is evil and reckless. I don't throw those works around lightly. They are hurting the Black cause and damaging society along the way.

And your ad spending is helping.

It's been pointed out to me by smart folks that Fox News makes far more money from the fees it gets from cable distributors than advertisers. So even if the network lost it's revenue, it would probably survive. Yet advertisers have so much more influence than their dollars — all the cultural power they really do yield could be put to powerful use here. The pressure they could exert via a Fox News ad boycott would be remarkable.

That is, if they're brave enough to do it.

By the way, if they really wanted to hit the company — as former GroupM CEO Rob Norman did— a full boycott of News Corp would do it. 

Of course, pulling your spending from Fox Sports, "The Simpsons," The Wall Street Journal, etc. would cause a lot of collateral damage — yet if you want to hit the organization that supports deliberate bigotry, you've got to hit hard.

For now, I'd advocate for a more direct appeal. For all the T-Mobiles and Papa Johns and Geicos and Subarus of the world (all Fox News advertisers this year, per iSpot), if you really want you to find a purpose, what better one is there than racial justice — or even just the betterment of society.

That takes actions, not tweets. Start by defunding Fox News.

SEE ALSO: Older fans may leap back into watching sports on TV post-pandemic, but networks are going to have a tougher time winning back younger viewers

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• James Murdoch, the eldest son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, made an abrupt exit from the board of directors at News Corp. on Friday, citing "disagreements" with certain editorial content from the company.
• "My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company's news outlets and certain other strategic decisions," Murdoch wrote in his brief two-sentence resignation letter dated July 31.
• The Murdoch family controls two major media companies — News Corp. and Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News and the Fox Broadcasting Co.
• His resignation came six months after he slammed News Corp. and Fox News for promoting climate-change skepticism amid the Australian bushfires earlier this year.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

James Murdoch, the eldest son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, abruptly resigned from the board of News Corp. Friday, according to a company statement.

"My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company's news outlets and certain other strategic decisions," Murdoch wrote in his brief two-sentence resignation letter dated July 31.

The Murdoch family controls major media companies — including News Corp. and Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News and the Fox Broadcasting Co.

His resignation came six months after he slammed News Corp. and Fox News for promoting climate-change skepticism amid the Australia bushfires that devastated parts of the country earlier this year.

"Kathryn and James' views on climate are well established and their frustration with some of the News Corp. and Fox coverage of the topic is also well known," a spokesperson for Murdoch and his wife told The Daily Beast at the time.

"They are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary," the spokesperson added.

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James Murdoch, the son of Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, said he left his father's media empire because it obscured facts and legitimized disinformation.

In an interview with the New York Times, Murdoch for the first time discussed the reasons for his decision to depart the board of News Corp, the media company owned by his father, which controls publications including The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, as well as several publications in Rupert Murdoch's native Australia. 

His father's other company, Fox Corp, runs the Fox News network, which is run by his brother, Lachlan Murdoch. 

"I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that's important," Murdoch said in the interview. "But it shouldn't be in a way that hides agendas. A contest of ideas shouldn't be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it's often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt — not to sow doubt, to obscure fact, if you will."

News Corp did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Murdoch's remarks. 

In July, Murdoch announced that he was resigning his position at News Corp and had told The New Yorker about his unease with coverage at Fox News. Top-rated hosts on the network are ardent supporters of President Donald Trump, and the network has spread misinformation about the coronavirus and climate change. 

"There are views I really disagree with on Fox," he remarked. 

Murdoch's Australian papers have also published articles questioning the reality of climate change after devastating wildfires in the country last year. In a statement to The Daily Beast earlier in 2020, James and his wife, Kathryn, had criticized the "ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia" as well as on Fox News. 

While James Murdoch was the top executive at News Corp's UK wing in 2011, the phone-hacking scandal broke. Reporters at British tabloids owned by the company illegally accessed the phones of celebrities, public figures, and crime victims. 

In a July statement, Murdoch announced that he was leaving News Corp "due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company's news outlets and certain other strategic decisions." 

He said he was setting up a foundation, Quadrivium, that would support democracy, voter participation, and climate change projects. 

Murdoch told the Times that his ability to influence the editorial directions of publications was limited as a board member.

"If you're uncomfortable with those decisions, you have to take stock of whether or not you want to be associated and can you change it or not. I decided that I could be much more effective outside."

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As Donald Trump's presidency nears an end, insiders at Fox News and the New York Post are wondering what's next for the most vocal pro-Trump personalities inside Rupert Murdoch's media empire.

On Saturday, after Fox and other outlets called the election for President-elect Joe Biden, there seemed to be a distinct change in direction at the network that not all anchors agreed with. On Monday night, Fox News' Tucker Carlson appeared to rail against his colleague Neil Cavuto after Cavuto cut away from press secretary Kayleigh McEnany for suggesting Democrats were "welcoming fraud."Carlson likened the cutaway to a dictatorship, though he did not directly name Cavuto.

One source described the shift to accept Biden's victory as the network's attempt to pacify the 71 million Trump voters, while also acknowledging Biden is the next president.

"They are not going to sneer Trump out of the door, and they're not going to disrespect the viewers," one person familiar with the network said. "The viewers are upset about what's happening, and Fox is not going to treat them like sore losers." 

Read more: Jared Kushner floating launch of a new Trump-branded media outlet, GOP sources say. It's another sign of a looming 2020 defeat.

Some insiders also wondered if any members of the prime-time lineup, such as Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, would exit to the Fox News rivals Newsmax, OAN, or perhaps the rumored Trump-branded media outlet. 

On a call with analysts last week, though, Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch said he was ready for competition, saying, "We fully expect to be No. 1 and maintain share."

Other people familiar with conversations inside Fox said there had also been speculation about the future of lesser Trump-aligned stars such as former Judge Jeanine Pirro, Jesse Watters, and Pete Hegseth. Fox, like other media companies, has been looking to cut payroll, a source said.

A knowledgeable source said the Fox News talent pool was already locked up and had multiyear deals, however.

Two people said Rupert Murdoch threw in the towel on Trump as far back as June over Trump's handling of the pandemic and was further dismayed by the president's performance in the first debate. 

Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, even visited the White House to share Murdoch's views, according to a source. In a widely circulated clip, Trump described Thomson as "the most powerful man in all of the media." 

"They treat me very nicely, the media, except for the WSJ, but that's OK," Trump says in a clip posted on March 6 by the New York Post. 

Soon after, Carlson visited Trump's Florida resort Mar-a-Lago to communicate a similar message. "There were multiple efforts to tell him to act more empathetic and to take [the virus] more seriously — multiple attempts," one source said.  

On March 23, the Los Angeles Times interviewed Carlson, who confirmed he visited the president to tell him about the seriousness of the coronavirus, in contrast to the stance of both the president and some of his Fox News colleagues. 

In April, Fox News parted ways with two commentators known as Diamond and Silk for promoting conspiracy theories about the coronavirus and with the Fox Business host Trish Regan after she aired a segment titled, "Coronavirus Impeachment Scam." 

Meanwhile, at the New York Post, where staff remain working from home, the office gossip focused on the future of pro-Trump opinion columnists such as Miranda Devine and Michael Goodwin. Col Allan, who returned to the New York Post "to make it more fair to Trump," according to one source, confirmed to The New York Times he was retiring next year. 

One insider said: "There's collective relief among the liberals that the New York Post has confirmed Joe Biden as president-elect, but a handful of Trumpers are not so happy." 

Reps for both News Corp. and Fox News declined to comment.

Editor's Note: Claire Atkinson was previously employed at the New York Post.

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With bars and restaurants at limited capacity, and social gatherings discouraged, movies and TV have become an important pasttime in quarantine. The media moguls behind what we watch are paid millions to lead their companies. 

The average executive at ViacommCBS, Disney, Discovery, Fox, Netflix, Comcast, and News Corp. made $20 million in 2019 total reported compensation, ranging from $483,097 to $125 million. Using compensation information disclosed in firm proxy statements, Business Insider analyzed the compensation of executives from top media firms to better understand how media giants think about pay. 

CEO compensation at media giants

We analyzed compensation data for CEOs from ViacommCBS, Disney, Discovery, Fox, Netflix, Comcast, and News Corp. Together, these seven CEOs made a sum of $350 million in 2019. 

The highest earner was Joseph Ianniello from ViacommCBS, whose compensation situation was unique in 2019 due to an $84 million payment he received as part of an employment agreement. Ianniello's total reported compensation in 2019 was $125.4 million. 

Other than Ianniello, the CEOs received compensation between $14 million and nearly $50 million. 

For all CEOs, equity awards were a large part of compensation packages. On average, equity awards (including both stock awards and option awards) made up nearly 50% of the executives compensation packages, up to 97% of total compensation for Netflix's Reed Hastings. 

Equity awards often are tied to particular performance goals. For example, News Corporation's proxy statement notes that 80% of CEO Robert Thomson's and Executive Chair Rupert Murdoch's compensation is "at risk," or not guaranteed and dependent on performance.

In the chart below, we show compensation for each CEO as it was presented in the summary compensation table in each firm's proxy statement, split out by element. The values in the chart, then, follow SEC requirements for compensation disclosure, and the actual earnings realized by executives can vary. Hold your cursor over the labels at the top to highlight the different parts of the executives' compensation, and reference the bulleted list at the end of the article for more information on each compensation element.

Other executives at these media giants earned millions

Besides the CEO, public companies are required by the SEC to disclose the compensation of the CFO and the three otherwise highest-paid individuals at the firm. Because of this, we're able to look further into each of the media giants, to see how high-level executives besides the CEO were paid. 

The executives we examined include CFOs, COOs, communications officers, contents officers, legal officers, and more. The salaries for these other executives ranged from $57,692 for ViacommCBS' chief people officer (this salary represents partial year pay) to $18,000,000 for Netflix's chief content officer. 

We've compiled this data into a searchable database below. In the table, you can click any title heading to sort (for example, you can click "Salary" to sort the table by salary from low to high, and click it again to sort from high to low). You can also search for a specific executive or company using the search bar. The table also scrolls horizontally. Navigate or scroll to the right to view all available data.  

What the terms in the table mean:

• Salary: The salary an executive earns in a given year.
• Stock awards/option awards: Equity awards based on achievement within a firm's long-term incentive plan. Long-term incentives are also considered "at-risk" pay. Stock and option awards are two different types of equity awards — stocks are direct equity awards, while options give the executive the right to buy shares at a specific price.
• Bonus/NEIP: Typically cash grants for performance in the short term. Bonuses are typically one-off awards, while anything in the column titled NEIP (nonequity incentive plan) typically means the awards are granted as part of a firm's short-term incentive plan and granted in cash (hence the "nonequity" label). Short-term incentives are thought of as part of "at-risk" pay, meaning that the executive must hit goals or benchmarks to receive the award.
• Other compensation: This number includes any value from the compensation data related to pension plans or nonqualified deferred-compensation earnings. It also includes any payments designated as "other compensation," which can include payment for things like personal or home security, employees' benefits plans, country-club fees, fees related to use of company aircraft, and even relocation expenses. 
• Total compensation: All amounts summed. 

SEE ALSO: Executive compensation revealed: What people in the C-suites of Apple, Facebook, Disney, and 90 other big tech and media companies earn

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Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire media tycoon behind Fox News and News Corp, has slammed an "awful woke orthodoxy" that he says stifles debate and promotes conformity on social media. 

The octogenarian businessman made the comments on Saturday during a recorded acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award from the Australia Day Foundation, a United Kingdom nonprofit, the New York Times reported. Melbourne's Herald Sun newspaper, a News Corp holding, published the video, the Times said. 

In the clip, Murdoch thanked the foundation for the award and indicated that his time in media isn't over, despite the "finality" of the award.

"I can assure you that there are many goals still to come and challenges to overcome," Murdoch said. "I'm far from done."

Read more:Former Cambridge Analytica director Brittany Kaiser talks data rights legislation and the future of Big Tech under Biden

Murdoch, News Corp's executive chairman, also took aim at social media and so-called cancel culture, echoing claims from some far-right politicians and pundits that their views are being censored by tech companies and mainstream media outlets. 

"For those of us in media, there's a real challenge to confront: a wave of censorship that seeks to silence conversation, to stifle debate, to ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential," Murdoch said.

"This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibility. Too many people have fought too hard in too many places for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful woke orthodoxy."

The remarks came just weeks after several social media platforms banned President Donald Trump for posting misinformation and inciting violence in the leadup to and during the January 6 Capitol riot, fueling renewed allegations of leftwing bias in Big Tech and suppression of conservative thought online.

In an effort to stem the spread of misinformation and further violence, Twitter also purged thousands of QAnon-related accounts and temporarily suspended newly elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, while Amazon, Apple, and Google dropped conservative-leaning social media site Parler from their respective platforms. 

Like Murdoch, some Republican lawmakers have used their reach to take swipes at what they see as the silencing of conservative ideas. Greene wore a facemask embroidered with the word "censored" while delivering a televised speech on the House floor earlier this month. 

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who has caught heat for his efforts to overturn the results of the November election, lost a book deal with Simon & Schuster after the Capitol insurrection and took to Twitter to deride the publishing house's "woke mob."

He also wrote an op-ed for the Murdoch-owned New York Post titled "it's time to stand up against the muzzling of America," which was featured on the paper's front page on Monday. 

However, the powerful Murdoch family isn't in agreement about the role of the media in politics. James Murdoch, the elder Murdoch's youngest son, indirectly criticized his family's empire when he blamed news outlets that "propagate lies" for their role in the Capitol siege in a recent Financial Times interview. 

"I hope that those people who didn't think it was that dangerous now understand, and that they stop," Murdoch told the paper. 

He did not mention any outlets by name, but Fox News has been criticized for giving airtime to baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. 

SEE ALSO: How Google finally decided to remove Parler after months of flagging the app's harmful content

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Google has struck a deal with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, offering "significant" payments to display content from outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post on its News Showcase.

The agreement is a major victory for Murdoch and News Corp, which have long argued major tech firms should pay for the news content they display on their sites. The deal comes as Australian lawmakers prepare to debate new regulation that would force Google to pay news publishers to display their stories in its search results.

Murdoch has been one of the Google's most vocal critics, having previously called for the company to be forcibly broken up. 

Under the terms of the new deal, News Corp titles such as the Journal and the Post in the US, as well as British outlets such as The Times, Sunday Times, and The Sun, will make some content freely available to Google News users. 

Robert Thomson, Chief Executive of News Corp, said: "I would like to thank Sundar Pichai and his team at Google who have shown a thoughtful commitment to journalism that will resonate in every country.

"This has been a passionate cause for our company for well over a decade and I am gratified that the terms of trade are changing, not just for News Corp, but for every publisher." 

"Over the years Google has invested significantly to help news organizations, including the Google News Initiative, our ad technology services, subscription tools, and our $1bn for news partnerships through Google News Showcase that pays publishers to curate content for an enhanced online news experience," said Don Harrison, Google's president of global partnerships.

"News Showcase now has partnerships with over 500 publications around the world, demonstrating the value this product can bring to our news partners and readers everywhere. We hope to announce even more partnerships soon."

Amid growing pressure to address the imbalance between tech platforms and legacy news outlets, Google has already signed up more than 450 publications worldwide to its Showcase platform, through which Google News users can access paid-for content for free, with the search giant covering the price difference.

Within the past week, Google has inked two $30 million Showcase deals with Australia's Nine Entertainment and Seven West Media. 

While the News Corp deal does represent a breakthrough of sorts in the hostile relationship between Google and the Murdoch media empire, not everyone was impressed.  

Jeff Jarvis, a professor of journalism and author of "What Would Google Do?" branded the deal a case of "media blackmail." 

"Google & FB won't change; they will maintain unread news features as loss makers to pay off the publishers," he wrote on Twitter. "The publishers won't change because they got a little more money. Startups will suffer. News will suffer. Society will suffer.

"Well done, everyone."

Australian lawmakers are expected to debate the details of its "news media bargaining code" later this month. 

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It's 2 a.m. Sydney time, and Lachlan Murdoch is on the phone with Insider for one of two middle-of-the-night interviews.

Since March, Lachlan has been running Fox Corp. from 10,500 miles away in Australia, where local papers have reported sightings of the handsome billionaire out for lunch at Sydney's Rockpool restaurant and cruising around town in his Maserati.

The distance has led some industry insiders to question Lachlan's devotion to the company and whether he is an active leader or a mere figurehead. In April, The New York Times reported that his remoteness had "intensified the perception … that Mr. Murdoch does not have a tight grip on the reins." According to a source close to the family, Lachlan's younger brother, James, the once heir apparent, "is running a whisper campaign that Lachlan is not good at his job and that he doesn't deserve it."

But 49-year-old Lachlan is eager to prove critics wrong. His schedule includes an 8 p.m. bedtime so he can wake in the middle of the evening for midnight Zooms and conference calls. All he needs to power through is "one strong coffee at the beginning of the night," adding that his friend, an electrician on a nearby wharf, tells him not having the second cup is the key to sleeping during the day.

For years the baton switched between Lachlan and James, 48, as to who would succeed their father, Rupert Murdoch. Lachlan was viewed as the most likely successor until he abruptly resigned as COO of News Corp. in 2005 after a power struggle with Roger Ailes.

The Los Angeles Times reported at the time that Rupert and Lachlan clashed over other issues, too, including Lachlan's opposition to company headquarters moving from Sydney to New York and a lengthy vacation schedule (his father rarely took time off).

In 2014, when the prodigal son returned home to News Corp., James was  firmly ensconced in the power seat. But in 2019, as the Disney deal to acquire the majority of the company's cable networks and Hollywood studio assets came together, Rupert switched gears, deciding that Lachlan would be the best choice to run the new company. 

After all, it would be hard to see James, an outspoken Democrat, running a media company whose most profitable entity is the ultra-conservative Fox News. In 2019, James told the New Yorker that "There are views I really disagree with on Fox." CNN's Brian Stelter reported in his book, "Hoax," that James was critical of the "alternative reality" that Fox News created and blamed his brother for enabling it. In July 2020, James stepped down from the board of News Corp., citing "disagreements over certain editorial content."

Lachlan Murdoch preferred not to respond to questions regarding his brother's public attacks, instead heralding Fox News' diversity of opinion.

If anything, the world is more polarized nowadays because of social media, not Fox News, he says, because the medium "algorithmically drives people into echo chambers."

"If Facebook or Twitter and others ultimately become a bias filter for the facts that we take as truth in the world," Lachlan said. "I think that's really dangerous and a sort of scary world to live in."

Not only does Lachlan say he's actually running the show — he intends to do so for many years.

It hasn't been an easy two-year start as CEO of Fox Corp. Lachlan has had to deal with fractious COVID-19 debates, civil unrest, and calls for Fox News' biggest star, Tucker Carlson, to be fired.

But as Lachlan told Insider, "Growing up around the company, and sometimes controversies, you learn to have a pretty thick skin."

Tucker Carlson's defender

When Lachlan Murdoch was named CEO of Fox Corp. in 2019, he was given a rare opportunity "to start with a blank sheet of paper," he said. 

That year, Rupert sold Fox's Hollywood studio business, regional sports networks and its FX and National Geographic channels to Disney for $71.3 billion. Fox News is the company's biggest moneymaker. As such, it is the primary focus of Lachlan's time and interest. 

He consults daily with Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media and sits on a daily morning call there. While he mostly listens, Lachlan weighs in when there are big talent decisions or high-level hirings and firings. 

Last month, Lachlan stood by Tucker Carlson as the American Defamation League called for his firing over his segments promoting "replacement theory," saying that an increased number of immigrants will make it harder for Republicans to win elections.

Lachlan called Carlson and some of his viewpoints, which he says caters to what many Americans are quietly thinking, "brave." And when Carlson questioned the efficacy of vaccines for COVID-19 and cited the number of people who died after taking the vaccine, Lachlan came to his defense again.

"He basically just went into the CDC data, right?" Lachlan said.  "So there's nothing the CDC itself isn't saying." 

(Factcheck.org denounced Carlson's statement, explaining that anyone can submit a report of an adverse side effect following vaccination, without verification or proof that it was caused by the vaccine. One alleged vaccine-related death included in Carlson's report included a 17-year-old who shot himself with a gun eight days after receiving the vaccine.)

When it comes to politics, Lachlan believes Fox News is right where it should be. Former President Donald Trump attacked Fox News for "pandering to the left" after Fox called election results for Joe Biden hours ahead of other outlets. 

"Trump was attacking us nonstop, and we didn't bend to that," Lachlan said. "Obviously our opinion is center-right. We held our own. We were happy with where we were. In a strange way, if you've got the left and the right criticizing you, you're doing something right. You really are in the middle." 

When pressed on whether Twitter and Facebook were right to ban the former president, Lachlan said social media should have consistent policies and not treat people with conservative leanings differently. But he admitted, "I'm happy we moved on into different news cycles."

A 'news junkie' at heart

It's not just a different news cycle for Fox; it's a new era under Lachlan Murdoch.

Fox is facing off against numerous competitors in the fight for streaming subscribers, including Comcast/NBCUniversal, Disney, and the new WarnerMedia/Discovery combination. As traditional TV sees big drops in ratings due to cord cutting, Lachlan has to build streaming and digital revenues faster than it disappears. He's betting on ad-supported businesses.

To that end, he's focused on moving Fox digital forward, acquiring the streaming service Tubi for $440 million in March 2020, nearly doubling Tubi's monthly users in one year. Tubi is a platform for other people's channels, as well as TV shows and movies. Lachlan partnered with Fox's owned stations as well as other local stations to put local live news feeds on Tubi.

"I'm a news junkie. So that was really me pushing that," Lachlan said. Tubi revenue is growing rapidly and Murdoch envisions it becoming a billion-dollar business over the next few years.  

Lachlan has also extended the Fox News brand into weather, lifestyle, and book imprints. He has renewed Fox's NFL rights in March and is growing Fox News' nascent Fox Nation subscription streaming service. Fox Corp. relinquished its Thursday Night Football package to Amazon, but is gaining new digital integration rights and has plans for a new NFL video-on-demand channel on Tubi. He's also putting his chips on sports betting becoming a big revenue generator; the company owns part of FanDuel. 

Tuna Amobi, an equities analyst at the investment-research firm CFRA, gives Lachlan credit for the company's recent digital advancements.

"There was a little bit of skepticism frankly at the outset," Amobi said of Lachlan's early days. "Then the company doubled down on digital, buying Credible Labs, a fintech firm, and gaming in Fox Bet. Lachlan was the main driver of that."

But some still remain skeptical over whether streaming and digital plans can make up for losses in traditional TV. 

"Fox Nation is not there yet, and so questions about recombining with News Corp., or other M&A may persist," BMO Capital's Daniel Salmon told investors in May. Lachlan says there are no plans to get back together with News Corp.

On Monday, May 17, Fox network made its play for billions of dollars in future advertising commitments. Tubi, Fox News, and Fox Sports already made their separate pitches.

Multiple people told Insider that Lachlan is searching for a new chief communications officer. Hope Hicks left in February 2020. The company is said to be looking for someone in the mold of Jill Hazelbaker, a top comms executive at Uber and Snap; or Rachel Whetstone, the chief communications officer at Netflix and a former Google executive. Both women are senior executives with conservative political backgrounds and tech company experience. 

Rupert Murdoch still looms large within Lachlan's Fox

Lachlan's journey to CEO was bumpy, to say the least. In 2005, he quit Fox after a turf war with the late Fox News founder, Roger Ailes, to live in Australia. There, he built his own firm, Illyria, investing in failing radio stations and turning them around. Proving he could be a successful entrepreneur on his own was a critical step on Lachlan's leadership journey.

"In life, you back yourself," he said. "Can you separate from the company and the broader family and a lot of your colleagues and go out on your own and build your own business and take a lot of risk?" 

Apparently, Lachlan could.

"It gives you a lot of confidence, when you come back to Fox, News Corp., that you succeeded outside the company you grew up in." One former Fox colleague, who dealt with Lachlan on a regular basis, told Insider that Lachlan called taking time off from the family business the second-best decision in his life (the first was marrying his wife, Sarah, with whom he has three children, Aerin, Kalan and Aidan).

While Lachlan Murdoch is eager to build his own "blank sheet" Fox, he is happy to have his father as a sounding board.

"We've worked together for so long. He's just an inspirational thinker and someone, who, when you talk to him, as I do a lot, he's always inspiring in his inquisitiveness," said Lachlan, who bought his father a piece of art for a celebration this summer of his 90th birthday.

Lachlan recalls watching a dispute between his father and a big advertiser who was threatening to pull ads from one of the company's newspapers after writing a series of negative articles. 

"I was sitting with my dad in this meeting, as a teenager, and my dad just listened to him, and gave him respect, and then said, 'that's fine, pull your advertising, but we're journalists and we have to write the story and it's true, right.' Commercial interests don't direct what we write and there's a very clear separation."

And as for the future, "My dad is still going strong, working every day and he's now into his tenth decade and, it's an exciting future ahead of us." 

Lachlan has been making an effort to be more visible, appearing at investor events such as the virtual MoffettNathanson media summit in May, heralding the $22 billion company's digital transformation. He plans to return to the US in the fall and will be on hand when staff returns to the Fox Corp. headquarters on September 7.

He also plans to be in New York to celebrate his 50th birthday the day after. 

There are rumors of a possible sale or a plan to take Fox private. Insiders can't help but wonder what the end game is for Lachlan Murdoch and whether he plans to stay in his role for the long haul.

Lachlan was quick to put those questions to rest.

"It's a terrific job," he said. "It's one I look forward to for decades and decades into the future."

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NOW WATCH: Sneaky ways Costco gets you to buy more

Noah Manskar worked at the New York Post as a business journalist on the early-morning shift, churning out as much content as possible — six or seven stories in a day.

Isolated and overworked during the pandemic, Manskar, 27, became increasingly frustrated when asked to drop what he was doing to re-report stories from the British tabloid the Daily Mail, like a days-old story on an FDA investigation into a potentially dangerous Arizona-based bottled-water company. 

"It almost seemed like we had this obsession with following the Daily Mail, but it was never really clear why," he told Insider. Disillusioned, Manskar quit the paper in April and now works as a freelance journalist and as the assistant manager at a restaurant in Brooklyn.

"It felt like a hamster wheel to me," he said of the Post.

Manskar is not alone in feeling disenchanted by the current era of the New York City tabloid. Insider spoke with eight current and former Post staffers and people close to the company. They described a newsroom reaching its breaking point due to its headlong pace and a series of journalistic scandals that have damaged the paper's credibility, most recently the resignation of Laura Italiano, a veteran reporter who said she was pushed to write an inaccurate story. 

"It's an excellent place to ply your trade. Over the past year, that deal that you make with yourself and that balance you strike"— between doing good work and stomaching the paper's mishaps — "became more and more difficult," a former Post reporter said.

Now staffers are trying to get an impression of new Editor-in-Chief Keith Poole, a British tabloid import who some Post insiders say has offered little direction since arriving in March. Poole honed his digital approach at his onetime employer, the Daily Mail, known for its celebrity coverage and rapid-fire strategy of aggregating global web stories. He spent more than a decade at the title in various editor roles before moving to the News Corp.-owned Sun.

A New York Post spokesperson said the paper is interested in any newsworthy story.

Ironically, the internal crisis has come as the paper achieved profitability for the first time "in modern times," News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson said when announcing the results in February. The Post has done so by improving its direct online advertising sales, increasing traffic during the Trump years, and cutting costs, including pandemic-related layoffs and a shift of print production to a New York Times plant in Queens, according to a person familiar with the business.

Insiders expect that maintaining profitability will be central to Poole's role and don't anticipate News Corp. to significantly invest in the Post as a result. That will mean continued pressure on output for Post employees.

"Morale is extremely low," one current staffer said. "I don't know anyone who is happy right now." Post staffers have been left frustrated that some of their journalistic wins — such as breaking open the scandal surrounding Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration's withholding New York's nursing-home COVID-19 death toll or its coverage of New York City's unsung pandemic heroes— have been overshadowed by unforced errors and the opinion side of the paper getting the "wood," tabloid jargon for the print front-page headline.

"It's still a good newspaper when it wants to be," Manskar said.

But some reporters worry about the Post's direction, and they described to Insider how they feel on edge about being asked to write questionable stories, particularly after Italiano's exit. 

"If she had to quit because she had enough, it's going to come for everyone," a current Post staffer said. "Everyone is going to have a moment where they're going to be like, 'I have to write this and take the heat or just quit.' Ideally, you want to quit before you have to write the story."

Post sources said a string of staffers have left in recent months — one person put the count at about 10. The New York Times reported in April that eight journalists had departed recently. A Post spokesperson said the paper employs about 300 people across the organization, mostly in the newsroom, and that several journalists had retired.

Post staffers say they're still unsure what to make of new EIC Keith Poole

A former deputy editor at the UK tabloid The Sun, Poole, 44, has marked his arrival at the Post by moving into the editor-in-chief cubbyhole in the paper's Manhattan newsroom and holding meetings with different sections of the paper. People at the Post told Insider he has been charming and amicable but noncommittal on strategy.

But he has studied up on the Post's long and colorful history. The paper was founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton but became infamous in recent decades for its brazen headlines, sports page, hard-bitten metropolitan reporting, celebrity gossip, and conservative political streak that concentrates on crime, homelessness, and support of the New York Police Department. Poole told employees he is reading the former editor and current columnist Steve Cuozzo's book "It's Alive!," a love letter to tabloid journalism celebrating Rupert Murdoch's 1977 takeover of the then near-bankrupt paper.

Poole's own politics are still somewhat of a mystery to staff, in contrast to his de facto predecessor, Col Allan, the Australian tabloid veteran who led the paper from 2001 to 2016 and rejoined in 2019 as an advisor. A staunch Trump supporter, Allan shifted the paper further right in its politics. The Post later called on the former president to give up his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

One person who previously worked with Poole said he was an ambitious editor and energetic ex-smoker who seemed more interested in getting a juicy story than any specific ideology. "He's of the British-tabloid mold. Quite old-school and demanding for sure, but that's the nature of it," this person said.

Another former colleague described him as a "technocrat of news," steeped in search-engine optimization and the volume-based digital strategy championed by the Daily Mail, where he worked most recently as the managing editor of the US digital operation.

Poole did not return requests for comment and declined to comment for this story through the Post spokesperson.

Traffic figures from Comscore and Similarweb vary, but show that the Daily Mail has typically reached the larger audience of the two over the past 12 months. According to Similarweb, the Daily Mail brought in about 74.8 million unique visitors in April, compared to 67.5 million for the New York Post network of sites, which includes PageSix.com and Decider.com. Comscore figures, however, had the Post at 109.3 million unique visitors in April versus 100 million for the Mail.

It's a familiar battle for two tabloid foes that have fought each other in the UK for years. The Mail and the Murdoch-controlled Sun have taken blows from the pandemic's affect on print circulation and advertising.

Some Post employees are already complaining that they are being asked to do more aggregation — rewriting another outlet's story without adding significant additional reporting, a common practice across the internet at high-volume sites, including Insider. The practice provides a reliable business model for ad-driven publications like the Post, which are fighting to maintain the boom-time traffic levels inspired by the Trump years. 

To be sure, the Post has long been a high-speed website, with "lights and sirens" as Post shorthand for publishing quickly. But writers at the Post say they are being pushed to do more and more. One reporter said they have been asked to publish aggregated posts in the morning so they can spend the rest of their day on their other projects. A hands-on editor, Poole sends out stories he wants the Post to cover to Michelle Gotthelf, the digital editor-in-chief, according to one staffer familiar with the process. 

The focus on the Daily Mail has been a common internal complaint, insiders said. In one 36-hour period in June, 10 Daily Mail stories were assigned for rewrites in the Post's breaking-news Slack channel, according to a count by one staffer. Those assignments included a story about an Australian radio host's reaction to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's new baby and a British lotto winner who had died at 23, which was instead sourced to the Mirror. Because the Mail's web stories are typically themselves aggregated, Post hits will often link back to the original source, obscuring how its interest was piqued.

The Post spokesperson said the Post publishes about 350 stories in a 36-hour time frame, making those Daily Mail hits a small fraction. 

HR has reached out to staffers to gauge morale after a series of editorial controversies

Poole's surprise appointment came during a tumultuous time for the paper, which has muddled through a series of journalistic controversies in the past few months.

Weeks before the 2020 election, the Post published a report based on what it said were leaked files recovered from a computer owned by Hunter Biden. The Post's story suggested illicit connections with foreign businessmen involving his father, Joe Biden. The Post reporter who wrote most of the piece refused to put his byline on the story, according to The New York Times.

Post staffers vented anonymously to New York magazine to voice their skepticism about how the piece came together, and Twitter banned the story on its platform and locked the Post's account.

The Post embraced being "silenced" with typical panache. Manskar wrote the paper's initial post about Twitter and Facebook throttling the story, which he says was punched up by his editors. "They added a lot of adjectives and phrases to kind of play up how extraordinary it was and how much of an outrage the Post clearly thought it was as an institution," he said.

After Twitter's decision was criticized, CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted that the company was wrong to block the link. But Post staffers said there was no communication from the top of their organization during the media maelstrom. "It was radio silence while our résumés were being devalued in real time," one former staffer said.

Weeks later, the paper was widely condemned after it outed a New York City paramedic who supplemented her income with an OnlyFans account.

"The Post likes to make a point about worshipping 'New York's finest' but then turns around and slut-shames an EMT and turns her life upside-down for no reason," the same former Post employee said. "The attitude from the Post leadership is to wait until everyone forgets and then wait until the next controversy."

The next controversy followed in April, when the longtime Post reporter Laura Italiano resigned after she said she was forced to write a story falsely claiming that migrant children were given a book written by Vice President Kamala Harris. Italiano did not return requests for comment for this story.

After Italiano's exit, HR representatives began reaching out to some staffers to get a sense of morale and how they can respond better internally, according to one Post source.

One concern now, insiders say, is maintaining the paper's New York identity. Like many newsrooms, the Post laid off staffers in April 2020 and furloughed about half of its "runners"— employees tasked with rushing around the city to wrangle quotes, head to a crime scene, or conduct a stakeout.

The week before the furloughs, the Post had about 20 on the schedule, according to a person familiar with the matter. Now the paper has about nine part- and full-time runners, the person said.

In meetings, Poole has sought to emphasize his commitment to covering the city and maintaining the paper's traditional print product, staffers told Insider. On Monday morning, the website's homepage blared with classic Post fare: a critical story lambasting Mayor Bill de "Blasé" for ignoring crime.

As for Manskar, he said he's more fulfilled by his restaurant job than he was at the Post, where he felt he was exposed to the harsh realities of the media. "There's this really aggressive drive to churn out content, feed the beast, and get traffic without a lot of regard for how to support people," he said. "A lot of priorities are misplaced in this industry."

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The Wall Street Journal said on Thursday that it is shutting down its "Greater New York" section that covers city and regional news, according to a memo from Editor-in-Chief Matt Murray obtained by Insider.

Publication in print and digital will cease on July 9, Murray wrote, and team members will have the chance to apply for other jobs. 

Great New York, known internally as "GNY," launched in April 2010 as a standalone section. In 2016, during a round of Journal layoffs, it was folded into the main section of the paper in the New York region. 

The Journal also announced a series of new initiatives, including a new "Life & Work" coverage area led by Nikki Waller, according to the memo. The move comes as the Journal is pursuing a greater focus on its digital efforts and SEO, as Insider has reported.

A Journal spokesperson declined to comment further. 

Here's the full memo sent to Journal staffers on Thursday:

Over the last several years we've taken a number of steps across the newsroom to grow our audience in a rapidly changing world while focusing on deepening our coverage and digital presence, from upgrading our data and bringing better digital practices into each coverage area to growing video and audio. Today we are announcing several significant moves aimed at further growing our reach and better serving our audiences.

First, we're launching a new coverage area called Life & Work, which will be led by Nikki Waller. Life & Work will be an important way of widening our lens of business, markets and economics and serving decision-makers. It will arm all of our audiences with more information and insight for the big decisions they face in their lives, from how they spend, save, and invest to how they plot their careers, pay for school and travel, from how they buy and consume things to how they spend their leisure time. Building on our rich legacy of smart and ambitious feature writing and useful, expert advice, Life & Work will aim for deeper digital engagement and cover a wider range of topics than ever before.

The team will bring together the Personal Finance team under Bourree Lam, the Personal Technology team under Wilson Rothman, the Careers & Work team under Lynn Cook and the existing Personal Journal team—all areas producing some of our most popular and innovative digital journalism. Importantly, we also will be adding new roles and positions to grow coverage in those and other areas. In all, Life & Work will soon number more than 60 journalists. The Personal Journal name will continue in the print section.

Nikki is brilliantly suited to lead this new team to greater heights. In her previous roles she has shown time and again that she is a creative, thoughtful and entrepreneurial editor and dynamic leader. Previously she was the deputy corporate coverage chief, and before that led our Live Journalism Team, served as Management & Careers bureau chief, and oversaw personal finance and travel coverage on WSJ.com. Nikki will report to Elena Cherney. Please join me in congratulating her for this important new role.

I'm delighted that Lisa Bannon, who as PJ editor has overseen a great deal of distinguished and impactful coverage and has been a dedicated editor and champion of her team, is taking on a new reporting position on the Enterprise Desk, where she will focus on in-depth stories for Matthew Rose. Lisa deserves all of our gratitude and admiration.
Second, we are creating a Speed & Trending desk that will be responsible for writing and publishing the first take on many breaking stories, raising both our metabolism and our volume on breaking news.

Aiming to add more immediacy to the trust and authority of our news, the team will especially focus on SEO and trending stories that align with our mission and identity to better compete in the digital news space and help us more quickly bring authority and depth to our audiences on developing stories. For all the genuine progress we have made in recent years, we must increase our timeliness, volume and relevancy, without sacrificing quality. The desk will work closely with all coverage areas, with an aim of being additive and complementary, while growing the audience. It will be part of the News Hub and report to Jason Anders.

We're looking for a dynamic leader with excellent news judgment and high energy to lead this team. This position, as well as reporting and editing roles to staff the desk, are being posted later today at WSJ.jobs. We aim to staff up quickly and launch within a few weeks.

Inevitably, as we evolve the newsroom and aim to focus our journalistic mission, we are faced with some hard decisions. This morning, we informed the Greater New York staff that we're shutting down the team and ceasing publication in print and digital on July 9. Team members will have the chance to apply for other jobs.

The GNY team has done phenomenal work. GNY was launched in April 2010, with a hard-working and talented staff that made the Journal a bigger voice in the city and state and infused the entire news operation with greater urgency and relevance. Among other memorable moments, in 2012 the team won a Sigma Delta Chi Award for Deadline Reporting for its work on Superstorm Sandy. I'm grateful to all of those who have worked for GNY and made it such a journalistic force.

At a challenging moment and time of great change, I deeply appreciate your superb work and dedication to our mission. Across every coverage area and team, recent weeks especially have seen a superb run of scoops, strong and relevant news reporting and impactful, memorable enterprise work. It is reflected in strong traffic, lively article pages and compelling newspapers that really matter to people. You all continue to accomplish a great deal—and together we have much to do and to look forward to in the weeks ahead.

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The media world is in a period of consolidation, from small companies to giants like WarnerMedia and Discovery. 

The digital-publishing space has been no exception, with BuzzFeed announcing last month that it would acquire Complex Networks and go public via a special-purpose acquisition company.

While CEOs, bankers, and advisors are typically the the most high-profile dealmakers in the digital-publishing space, some of these companies also employ corporate development specialists who evaluate potential acquisitions.

Insider has identified 13 of the key behind-the-scenes employees working on M&A for some of the most active digital publishers. They're likely to have a busy second half of the year.

This list is ordered alphabetically by company.

Alex Mather, CEO of The Athletic

Yes, Mather is a CEO, but media insiders say he has been the key figure leading the company's recent corporate development efforts.

The Athletic has been the subject of plenty of reporting about potential M&A activity, reportedly speaking to Axios and The New York Times about tie-ups — though both conversations reportedly broke down, according to the Information and the Wall Street Journal.

An Athletic spokesperson would not comment but said that the company has not yet hired a banker.

Mather cofounded the paid subscription sports site in 2016. Prior to that, he was vice president of product management and product design at Strava, a social network for athletes. 

Gabriel Brotman, senior vice president of investments, and Lars Kahl, senior vice president of investments and business development at Axel Springer

Brotman and Kahl are Axel Springer's duo in the US working on digital media investments as the German publishing giant — which owns Insider — expands its footprint. 

Brotman was previously a cofounder of Politico Europe, a joint venture between Politico and Axel Springer. He worked in corporate development at Politico's parent company on acquisitions like European Voice and Capital New York. 

Kahl joined Axel Springer's accelerator in Berlin in 2016 before moving to its digital unit. Since 2019, he has worked out of New York on international investments.

"Apart from the well-reported consolidation trends, we're seeing a lot of successful entrepreneurs and startup teams looking for bigger platforms to fuel growth, diversification and geographic expansion. That's where we see our sweet spot," Brotman and Kahl said in an email to Insider.

Roy Schwartz, cofounder and president of Axios

Schwartz cofounded Axios with CEO Jim VandeHei and newsletter writer Mike Allen. The three branched off in 2017 after working at Politico, where Schwartz served as chief revenue officer. 

Along with VandeHei, Schwartz works on Axios' M&A strategy. Last year, the company bought Charlotte Agenda as it readied a push into local news. Schwartz told Insider that Axios is geared toward a readership of smart business professionals. "Our consolidation philosophy is driven by our desire to continue to grow and support that audience," he said. 

Axios has itself been a target of deal chatter in recent weeks. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company spoke with The Athletic, but that those talks halted. The Information reported in May that the company was in talks to be acquired by Axel Springer.

Spokespeople for Axios and Axel Springer declined to comment.

Sharmi Gandhi, senior vice president of corporate development at Bustle Digital Group

Bustle Digital Group has been known as one of the main bargain hunters in digital media, grabbing up properties like Nylon, Elite Daily, and Gawker's intellectual property for a forthcoming relaunch. Gandhi now oversees M&A activity after joining in March.

She previously worked at Endeavor Streaming, launching consumer OTT video services. She was also executive vice president of strategy and development at Mic, which Bustle Digital Group acquired in 2019. 

"The media industry is incredibly active right now, and we're going to see several deals happen over the next year," Gandhi told Insider. "I'm focused on finding media brands with passionate audiences that would benefit from leveraging BDG's shared sales, tech, and support infrastructure."

Felicia DellaFortuna, chief financial officer at BuzzFeed

Spurred by CEO Jonah Peretti's long-held goal to roll up more digital media companies, BuzzFeed announced last month that it will go public via a special-purpose acquisition company and acquire style and sports publisher Complex Networks for $300 million. Earlier this year, BuzzFeed closed its acquisition of HuffPost.

Now the company is on the hunt for more acquisitions. At the press conference announcing the SPAC, Peretti was joined by DellaFortuna, BuzzFeed's chief financial officer. While Peretti is BuzzFeed's key deal maker, DellaFortuna works behind the scenes on the company's acquisitions.

DellaFortuna joined in 2015 as a senior director of finance, and previously worked at adtech company and Myspace owner Viant.

Peter Lattman, managing director at Emerson Collective

Lattman looks after media investments for Emerson Collective, the investment vehicle of Laurene Powell Jobs, who has spent the last few years increasing her footprint in media.

He is the vice chairman of The Atlantic, which Emerson took control of in 2017. He also sits on the board of Anonymous Content, the studio behind "Mr. Robot," in which Emerson holds a controlling stake. 

"Quality and commercial value are not mutually exclusive. That's a core belief," Lattman told Insider about Emerson's investment philosophy.

Before joining in 2016, Lattman worked as a journalist for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. 

Taha Ahmed, vice president of corporate development and strategy at Forbes

Ahmed leads M&A and investments at Forbes, which has itself been the subject of takeover rumors. Reuters reported in May that the business publisher is in talks to be acquired by an investor group for $650 million. A Forbes spokesperson did not immediately comment.

Forbes is currently owned by Hong Kong-based Integrated Whale Investments, which bought 95% of the company in 2014. 

Ahmed has plenty of digital-media M&A experience. As an executive at Group Nine Media, he was involved in the 2016 roll-up of Thrillist, NowThis, The Dodo, and other properties into one digital media entity. He began his career as an analyst at Goldman Sachs.

Sean Macnew, chief financial officer at Group Nine Media

Sean Macnew joined Group Nine via an acquisition — he was the chief financial and operating officer for Popsugar, which Group Nine took over in 2019.

Now the company is preparing for an even bigger deal. Group Nine became the first large digital publisher to embrace the SPAC trend earlier this year. The Group Nine SPAC, where Macnew also serves as CFO, plans to eventually acquire Group Nine along with another media company. 

"Our inorganic growth strategy continues to focus on expanding our reach through new categories, deepening our audience connection in existing categories, and adding new capabilities to make us even more nimble," Macnew told Insider.

He previously worked at Symantec and holds an MBA from Stanford. 

Brandon Sokol, senior vice president of corporate development and strategy at News Corp

Sokol joined News Corp in 2017 and focuses on M&A activity, including the company's recent purchase of Investors Business Daily and book publisher Houghton Mifflin. He also works on divestitures, like News Corp's sale of its adtech unit Unruly to Tremor International last year. 

A graduate of DePauw University, where he edited the college newspaper, Sokol previously worked in corporate development roles at Mediaocean and Tribune Media.

He began his career as a tech, media, and telecom analyst at J.P. Morgan, and has an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. 

William Bardeen, chief strategy officer at the New York Times

Bardeen oversees all business development and M&A at The New York Times, which he joined in 2004. He was named chief strategy officer in November 2018. 

The newspaper is sitting on a large cash position that could fuel more acquisitions in the future. Recently, the Times has been making moves in audio, acquiring Serial Productions for $25 million, as well as subscription audio app Audm, last year.

Bardeen previously worked as a managemnt consultant. According to a 2007 wedding announcement, his paternal grandfather was John Bardeen, a two-time winner of the Nobel Prize in physics.

Hozefa Lokhandwala, chief strategy officer at Vice

Lokhandwala leads Vice's corporate strategy when it comes to business development and M&A. He joined the company after serving as a managing director focusing on media investments at JPMorgan.

Lokhandwala, who holds a JD from Brooklyn Law School and an MBA from Columbia, might have a busy few months. Many in the digital-media world are wondering what comes next for Vice, whose CEO Nancy Dubuc has signaled it might be the next digital media company to pursue a SPAC. 

The company has also made recent acquisitions, like its 2019 purchase of Refinery29.

Shyra Smart, senior vice president for business development and corporate development at Vox Media

Smart joined Vox Media through its 2019 merger with New York Magazine's parent company, where she ran business development and worked on partnerships, distribution, and syndication. Smart, who went to the University of Pennsylvania and has an MBA. from NYU, previously worked at the Daily Beast, Viacom, HBO, and Fox Searchlight Pictures. 

Smart told Insider that she expects to see a lot of consolidation in media in the near-term as companies continue to attempt to diversify revenue streams. "We're starting to see a landscape in which only the strongest operators in the space will be left standing," she said. 

"Our approach to M&A is extremely methodical, we're not out here looking to gobble up distressed assets at a discount, or use severe cost cutting strategies to integrate. We're looking for assets that will complement and continue to scale our business," Smart added.