James Murdoch is making one of the biggest moves of his post-Fox career, acquiring roughly half of Vox Media in a deal that dramatically expands the younger Murdoch’s footprint in American media while further distancing himself from the empire built by his father, Rupert Murdoch.
The deal includes Vox Media’s podcast network along with New York magazine — a publication once owned by Rupert Murdoch himself — and represents a major new chapter for James Murdoch after years of public tension with the direction of the family’s media companies.
Murdoch, 53, emphasized in an interview with The New York Times that he is not interested in building another traditional daily news operation. Instead, he said he wants to focus on “longer-form, thoughtful journalism that can really speak to the culture.”
“We want to create platforms where really amazing, talented people can come and do the best work of their lives,” Murdoch said.
The acquisition marks Murdoch’s largest deal since his family reached a $3.3 billion settlement last year resolving a bitter internal battle over control of the broader Murdoch media empire, including Fox News and News Corp.
James Murdoch publicly split from News Corp’s leadership years earlier, resigning from the company’s board in 2020 while criticizing what he called the “ongoing denial” of climate change across some of its outlets. Since then, he and his wife Kathryn have backed a number of center-left and anti-Trump media ventures, including The Bulwark and The 19th.
Still, Murdoch rejected the idea that this new acquisition is meant as some ideological counterweight to his father’s media empire.
“No,” he said when asked whether he was intentionally building something different. “I’m just trying to build a great business.”
The deal also highlights how dramatically the digital media landscape has shifted over the last decade.
Vox Media was once one of the crown jewels of online publishing, grouped alongside companies like BuzzFeed and Vice Media during the peak of venture-backed digital journalism. At one point, Vox Media reportedly carried a valuation near $1 billion. But the economics of digital publishing have changed brutally in recent years as social media algorithms shifted, advertising markets weakened, and artificial intelligence disrupted web traffic.
Vice collapsed into bankruptcy. BuzzFeed recently sold a majority stake for a fraction of its former valuation. Vox Media survived largely by pivoting aggressively into podcasts and creator-driven content.
That podcast business now appears to be one of the primary reasons Murdoch wanted in.
According to company executives, Vox Media’s podcast network generated more than $80 million in revenue in 2025 and includes nearly 50 shows, among them “Pivot” with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway and the popular news podcast “Today, Explained.”
Murdoch described podcasts as more “authentic” than much of today’s algorithm-driven internet content, arguing that audiences are increasingly exhausted by what he called AI-generated “slop” and shallow media built entirely around ad optimization.
“It’s fun, it’s differentiated, and it has scarcity value,” Murdoch said of the company he hopes to build.
Not every Vox Media property is included in the sale. Sites like The Verge and Eater will remain outside the acquisition under a separate independent company, while Vox.com itself — founded by Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Melissa Bell — is part of the deal.
Jim Bankoff, Vox Media’s longtime CEO, said he viewed Murdoch as a “long-term steward” focused on innovation and journalism quality rather than short-term digital churn.
Bankoff also acknowledged the brutal realities facing modern publishers, particularly the collapse of search traffic caused by AI-generated summaries replacing traditional web referrals.
“For many publishers,” he noted, the rise of AI has taken “a wrecking ball” to digital advertising models.
The irony hanging over the entire deal is difficult to miss. One of Rupert Murdoch’s sons is now buying a major chunk of a progressive digital media company whose audience and editorial culture often stand in direct opposition to Fox News.
But James Murdoch appears less interested in ideological warfare than in building a different kind of media company altogether — one built around podcasts, premium culture journalism, live events, and audiences willing to pay for brands they trust in an internet increasingly flooded with disposable content.
