Fashion for focus may cast its gaze on media giants

[Commentary] Activist investors’ sudden interest in McGraw-Hill, home to local television stations, textbook publishers, aviation trade publications and the Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency, has revived the question of whether the diversified media conglomerate’s days are numbered.

So, too, should Rupert Murdoch’s troubles with the News of the World, which he told members of the British parliament accounted for less than 1 per cent of the wider News Corp group. This implied that he had been too thinly spread thinking about other arms of the business such as Fox News, Avatar, HarperCollins and Dow Jones to keep on top of the crisis brewing at a single UK tabloid. The question is not a novel one. The great US conglomerates of the 1960s and 1970s are now memories preserved by architectural relics. History and the cycles of corporate fashion suggest that new media conglomerates will soon emerge – some, perhaps, by buying the assets McGraw-Hill looks likely to shed. Old conglomerates that see the sense in focusing their energies might have to put up with smaller skyscrapers in future but they will be on firmer foundations.