Free «News Corporation» Essay Paper

News Corporation (News Corp.) is one of the largest media conglomerates of news and entertainment channels. It has been ranked the third in the world after Walt Disney and Time Warner Company, respectively. The channel is headed by Rupert Muldoch as both the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. It is listed on the NASDAQ as a public trading company. News Corp. securities are also traded at the Australian Stock Exchange. The directors of the corporation are elected by the shareholders annually at Annual General Meeting.

News Corp. is headed by a Board of Directors, with the Chairman and the Chief Executive Officer as the head. The size of the Board is determined by the Board as provided in the Corporation By-Law. The Board determines its own size from time to time, but there should not be less than three members at any given time. It then establishes broad policies of the corporation touching on all constitute companies under the corporation. This includes strategic business decisions and general governance. Below the Board there are heads of various regions. These include Heads of the European and Asian markets, North American, Australian and South American markets. These geographical divisions have each different heads of print, televisions and entertainment media. Finally, each of the independent entities making up the group has its administrative structures.

 

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News Corp. Mission Statement is “Creating and distributing top quality news, sports and entertainment around the world”. This mission captivates the group’s wide range of News services including sporting and entertainment, science and cultural news to millions of television viewers and newspaper readers around the world. In coordinating different products segments, the News Corp. has endeavored to separate each product management from each other. Each of the product line, for example television, has it own semi-autonomous management structure to support it. Overall, the Board and directors offer the general direction on which each constituent company of the group works. By having semi-autonomous management for each of its divisions, the channel is in the position to monitor and appraise each independently. This is easier in assessing the overall performance of the whole corporation. In return, the mission statement of quality news can easily be realized.

News Corp. has a matrix organization structure. This is because the corporation has a wide range of products, hence a wide range of functions. The corporation products are divided into Cable Network Programming, Filmed Entertainment, Television, Direct Broadcast Satellite Television, Publishing and others (News Corp.com 14). These different products require different functions of classifying people according to the functions they perform. A functional organization will have a Vice President as the head of the function. It also includes the customer service, production departments as well as accounting, administrative and support departments. This complexity between function and product organization structure has resulted in a complex hybrid of the two organizational structures. In the matrix structure each professional group, for example engineers, are pooled together in an engineering department and are answerable to an engineering manager. But since engineers are involved in facilitating production in the organization, they are in turn answerable to the heads of different products.

The ethical standard has been developed to help all employees of News Corp. to raise any query touching on the welfare of the organization and help to make the corporation structure flatter. This has given all employees a sense of incorporation in decision making process of the organization. Some of the areas the ethical standard covers include corporate assets and information as well as dealings with the outside world. For such a large entity as News Corp., this move instills confidence among its employees.