"Last week, Mr Murdoch stepped down from a number of boards, many of them small subsidiary boards, both in the UK and US," said a spokeswoman for News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of News Corp.

Mr Murdoch's resignations from the British directorships were "nothing more than a corporate house-cleaning exercise" before the restructuring, she said.

The decision to split News Corp has been applauded by shareholders, but it could throw into doubt the future of its loss-making newspapers, including The Australian.

Last month, industry sources disclosed that the daily broadsheet newspaper loses more than $25 million a year.

The failure of News Ltd’s digital paywall strategy, coupled with the unprecedented job cuts announced by the new chief executive, Kim Williams, last month, have cast a shadow over the Australian newspaper business that Mr Murdoch started building in 1952, when he inherited the Adelaide News from his father.



The Herald Sun website alone has lost almost 20per cent of its year-on-year traffic since the introduction of a paywall, Nielsen data says.



One media analyst, Steve Allen, has said that News Ltd’s underperforming newspaper assets face an uncertain future under the separation plan. "The big question is who would head the two different units in Australia," Mr Allen said. "But one suspects more restructuring would be required if [they were] separated, like [the] closure of more marginal or unprofitable magazines and newspapers."



Last month, a Morningstar media analyst, Tim Montague-Jones, told BusinessDay that a split-up of News’s Australian assets could force the newspapers to cut more costs.



"The newspapers would have to be accountable," he said. "They couldn’t cross-subsidise. They would have to run on their own profit stream. There would be greater pressure to ensure the costs were cut from the traditional print division."



Claire Enders, the founder of the media research company Enders Analysis, said Mr Murdoch’s resignations were part of the "slow fade of Rupert and [his son] James from the UK" that began last year and it will be "complete and permanent".



"The grip of the Murdochs, finger by finger, has been loosened and it’s not in order to return triumphantly; it’s a permanent shift," Ms Enders said. "James and Rupert have decided that they are not welcome in the UK, and they’re right."



with agencies



