Content area
Full Text
Daddy's girl. Rupert Murdoch's daughter has ambition, and she has hit the ground running in her first ventures.
--------------------
TWO days after her younger brother was named deputy chief executive of News Corporation's Australian subsidiary, Elisabeth Murdoch was asked if the new title implied he was being groomed for the company's top job.
"I don't think so," she replied. "But it does make me feel like I have to hurry up."
Certainly, no one could accuse Ms Murdoch of taking it easy. While her 24-year-old brother, Lachlan, has been climbing the corporate ladder in leaps and bounds, Elisabeth, 27, has been carving out her own route to News Corp's executive suite.
With the blessing - and loan guarantees of her father, Rupert - she hit the ground running last year with the purchase of two Northern California television stations. Husband Elkin Pianim, her partner in the project, had been scouting opportunities for months, but it was her father who found the stations - castoffs from a massive $500 million deal done by the News Corp-owned Fox Television Network.
Although the price tag - US$35 million (NZ$52.4 million) - was small by Fox standards, it was a huge responsibility for the then 25- year-old Murdoch. She had barely two years' management experience in television, and her husband, a former investment banker, had none.
It was also an exceptionally difficult time for Murdoch - she was just weeks away from giving birth to her first child when they took ownership of the stations.
"It was hard," she says. "I was back at work two weeks after she (daughter Cornelia) was born."
As president and general manager, Murdoch was run ragged trying to manage both stations. The largest facility, KSBW in Salinas, is located only half an hour from her home, but the other, KSBY in San Luis Obispo, is a three-hour drive away.
She and Pianim drove to San Luis once a week in the first months, and quickly began making personnel changes - beginning with a well- liked community service director, who had been at the station more than 13 years. Within a month they had sacked their newly appointed general manager.
In all, of a staff of 75, about 18 were either fired or...
