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

News Corp was formed in 1979 out of an Australian newspaper publishing company Murdoch owned. For decades, it was among the world’s largest media companies, with  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.

In June 2013, News Corp split into two companies, with the publishing properties retaining the name, and the entertainment properties — consisting largely of the various television and film entities, including Fox News — becoming 21st Century Fox. After the split, then, News Corp, which lost money as a publishing division in 2012 and continued to lose money in 2013, consists of 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, along with the Dow Jones newswire and HarperCollins and Harlequin books. The company is headed by former Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson, who expressed plans to shift focus onto mobile technology at the time of the split. (As part of the split, News Corp lost the period that had previously sat at the end of “Corp.”)

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 investigations from the FBI and Scotland Yard, and the arrests of several Sun journalists over alleged bribery of government officials. Rebekah Brooks, the former head of News International, was arrested and later charged with perverting the course of justice and conspiracy, though she was acquitted in 2014, while former News of the World editor Andy Coulson was convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to 18 months in jail. 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, now part of 21st Century Fox. MySpace and its newspaper division have both failed to generate significant contributions to that profit. Until the split, those organizations were subsidized in part by the large profits generated by other units of the former News Corp, such as 20th Century Fox.