Will New York Magazine Be Once Again Owned By a Murdoch?

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James Murdoch, the beneficiary of an extra $1.1 billion thanks to a settlement that extricated himself from his older brother and father’s News Corp and Fox empires, may getting back in to the media operating game in a big way.

The younger Murdoch is said to be in talks with Vox Media about buying New York magazine and Vox podcast division assets, Rupert Murdoch’s own crown jewel broadsheet The Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources. A rep for James declined to comment on the story from the paper, which said the deal could still fall apart.

Ever since exiting his perch as CEO of 21st Century Fox after most of its assets were sold to Disney in a $71.3 billion deal, Murdoch has focused his efforts on building up his venture company Lupa Systems. His firm has taken a stake in the owner of Art Basel as well as Tribeca Enterprises, which puts on the Tribeca Film Festival, among other assets.

Buying New York would be more akin to being a steward to one of the magazine world’s last standing giants — and it’s a publication that was also owned by his father for a 15-year run until Rupert’s News Corp divested of its holdings in 1991 sale. So there’s a Succession and media dynasty element to the potential deal as well.

New York, in its latest incarnation, has been owned by Vox Media since 2019, when the new media publisher picked up the venerable mag from Pamela Wasserstein, the daughter of investment banker Bruce Wasserstein, who had owned the publication since 2004. (Penske Media, the owner of The Hollywood Reporter, also has a stake in Vox Media as part of a 2023 deal announced by Bankoff and PMC owner Jay Penske.)

If a deal closes, Murdoch would be vaulted more prominently into the world of billionaires who own a single, influential news outlet, like Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post or Laurene Powell Jobs’ at The Atlantic or Marc Benioff at Time magazine or Patrick Soon-Shiong with The Los Angeles Times.

Despite his role as the heir to a famously swash-buckling, conservative-leaning media empire comprised of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and New York Post among its TV and publishing assets, James has studiously distanced himself from his older brother Lachlan’s politics and positioned himself as a centrist, donating to climate change non-profits and Democrat-leaning causes.

The Jim Bankoff-led Vox Media, the current owner of New York, is one of the last remaining new media companies that came of age during a time when BuzzFeed, Mashable, Mic and HuffPost led the way in the 2010s’ scale game to acquire tens of millions of readers monthly through maximizing distribution on social media. First Facebook turned the traffic spigot off and then AI-generated summaries turned away readers who may have clicked over from Google.

Vox Media, also the owner of Eater, The Verge, SB Nation as well as its explainer site Vox, has been speculated to be considering splitting off its publishing assets from its podcast assets (it’s the home of Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway’s Pivot show). The thinking being that suitors who may be interested in running the publishing assets will be operating a different media playbook than the podcasts, some of which have boomed in the video podcast era.

More to come.

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