News Corporation, often known simply as News Corp., is a media conglomerate founded and owned by Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

News Corp. was formed in 1979 out of an Australian newspaper publishing company Murdoch owned. It is now the world’s second-largest media company, behind The Walt Disney Co.

News Corp. has a wide variety of holdings across publishing, film, television, and the Internet, led by 20th Century Fox, Fox Broadcasting Company, Fox News Channel, Sky Broadcasting, and MySpace.

News Corp. owns newspapers primarily in Britain, the U.S., and Australia, including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, The Times of London and The Sunday Times, The Sun, and The Australian.

In June 2012, News Corp. began the process of splitting into two companies consisting of its publishing and entertainment properties. The publishing division, which lost money in 2012, will remain known as News Corp. and will consist of its newspapers, Dow Jones newswire, and HarperCollins books. It will be headed by Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson. The entertainment division will be called Fox Group and will consist largely of its various television and film properties, including Fox News. Murdoch resigned from the board of News International, News Corp.’s British newspaper division, in July 2012.

In July 2011, News Corp. closed the 168-year-old tabloid News of the World, which Murdoch had owned since 1969, over a phone-hacking scandal involving the paper’s reporters and editors that also prompted an investigation from the FBI and the arrests of several Sun journalists over alleged bribery of government officials. Rebekah Brooks, the former head News International, was arrested and later charged with perverting the course of justice and conspiracy. In total, more than 50 arrests had been made in the scandals by British police as of May 2012.

In its formal report on the scandal, issued in May 2012, the British Parliament declared that Murdoch was “not a fit person” to lead the company. As of the end of 2012, the scandal had cost News Corp. more than $360 million. News Corp.’s British newspaper division settled dozens of lawsuits with hacking victims in January 2012, and more than 100 civil lawsuits have been filed over the hacking. In February 2012, News Corp. launched the Sun on Sunday to take News of the World’s place as a Sunday tabloid, though that paper’s circulation fell 28% in its first two months. The scandal has prompted much criticism of a culture of corruption at News Corp.

News Corp. made $2.74 billion in profit in 2011, and as of 2011, most of its revenue came through cable network programming. MySpace and its newspaper division have both failed to generate significant contributions to that profit. Those organizations are subsidized in part by the large profits generated by other units of News Corp., such as 20th Century Fox.

Murdoch has been an outspoken proponent of paid content online and a critic of free aggregators and search engines, such as Google. He announced in 2009 that his newspapers would charge for online access within a year, and threatened to block Google’s access to his news sites. In 2012, however, News Corp. restored the content from all of its newspapers to Google’s indexing and reached a deal with Google to put its movies up for sale or rent via YouTube.