We only lost a few hundred mil, its good news!

[derf]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/bu...news.html?_r=1

Of all the businesses that the News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, owns, just one is performing well: cable networks, in particular Fox News.


The company, which also owns the Fox broadcast television network, MySpace, the 20th Century Fox film studio and newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, said Wednesday that fourth-quarter operating income, adjusted for certain items, plunged more than 30 percent.

Including nearly $680 million in charges, mainly at Fox Interactive Media, the unit that houses MySpace, the company reported a net loss of $203 million. “The last year has been one of the toughest we’ve faced in our history,” Mr. Murdoch said in a conference call with Wall Street analysts. But he added, “I think the worst may be behind us.”

Of the News Corporation’s eight business segments, just one — cable programming — reported a significant rise in operating income, which rose to $434 million, from $313 million in the same quarter last year. While the company did not disclose a specific figure, it said operating income at Fox News increased 50 percent.

The company, like its peers, has been cutting costs to weather the recession. The News Corporation, for example, has cut hundreds of jobs at MySpace alone. But cost-cutting can only last for so long.

“The rapid changes affecting the media business means no company is going to cost cut its way to global competitiveness,” Mr. Murdoch said.

The performance of the News Corporation underscored what has been occurring across the big media conglomerates: cable television, for which people still pay a monthly fee, is the only corner of that universe that is still operating robustly.

At the opposite side of the media spectrum is the newspaper business, where readers have become accustomed to getting their news free online. In the fourth quarter, the newspaper division of the News Corporation, which includes Dow Jones, the publisher of The Journal, reported operating income of just $96 million, a decrease of $167 million from the same period last year. For the full fiscal year, the unit’s operating income declined by $320 million.

Mr. Murdoch noted that the Internet had created opportunities to distribute news cheaply — no need for printing presses or trucks — but said, “it has not made content free. We plan to charge for all our news Web sites.” (The Journal is one of the few print publications that have succeeded in getting a portion of its readers to pay a subscription fee for online news.)

In the movie business, the News Corporation reported fourth-quarter operating income of $203 million, down 8 percent from last year. In broadcast television, an industry deeply affected by the advertising recession and the digital revolution, the company reported a decline of $184 million in operating income, to $95 million.

Over all, the company reported operating income of $948 million in the fourth quarter, down from $1.4 billion in last year’s fourth quarter.

For the full fiscal year, including the charges, the company reported a net loss of $5.4 billion. Excluding the charges, the company reported operating income of $3.6 billion, down $1.7 billion from its 2008 fiscal year.

Revenue for the quarter was $7.7 billion, down from $8.6 billion in the same period last year. This was in line with what Wall Street analysts had been expecting, according to Thomson Reuters.

Meanwhile, two of the News Corporation’s most prominent competitors, Time Warner and Viacom, both reported earnings recently. In each case, profits fell more than 30 percent. At Viacom, which owns MTV, VH1, Comedy Central and the Paramount film studio, profit fell 32 percent, but analysts saw a glimmer of hope in that advertising revenue at the company’s cable networks fell less than expected.

Profits at Time Warner fell by 34 percent, mainly because of the recession in advertising and slower sales of DVDs. Yet results were better than projected, and the company said it expected to end the year with profit essentially flat compared with 2008 — a performance that, seen in the context of the weak economy, many analysts saw as positive.