How Rupert Murdoch Suffered A Rare Defeat In American Classrooms
The media tycoon’s many insurgent businesses have risen to the top of their industries. But after attempting to take over the education market, Murdoch has been forced to retreat.
Amplify, Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to disrupt the American education industry, had a lot going for it: a lot of hype, a lot of media attention, a lot of high-profile names, and a lot of money to spend. Then add to all that the fact that the education industry seemed especially vulnerable — dominated by big, cozy, slow-moving incumbents, just the way Murdoch likes it.
But none of that mattered in the end. As it turns out, Murdoch’s News Corp. couldn’t even make waves in the education world, much less disrupt it. During its short life, Amplify bled money, losing $193 million in 2014 alone.
On Aug. 12, News Corp. said it was in final talks to sell Amplify, had written down the value of the business by $370 million, and would wind down the education unit’s first and most ambitious project, a custom-made tablet computer that was supposed to revolutionize education technology. The venture lasted just three years at News Corp.
Amplify’s high-profile failure, despite the people and money backing it, is a sign of just how strange and difficult to navigate the education industry can be. The company underestimated almost everything about the industry: the deep entrenchment of the biggest players and the complexities of selling to school districts — not to mention the surprising political power of parents and teachers unions, who had a not-insignificant hand in the company’s troubles.
Amplify’s pitch, when it launched in July 2012, was simple: It was neither an education publisher like Pearson, bogged down by the legacy of printed textbooks, nor a tech company like Apple, which didn’t understand teaching and curriculum. It made products that straddled that line: a tablet customized solely for classrooms, and, later, an education curriculum made only for digital devices.
And it had money, too, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in investment by News Corp, which had exited the education business a decade prior when its publishing arm, HarperCollins, stopped printing textbooks. Amplify hoped the money would allow it to compete on the same level as the country’s dominant textbook companies, Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, and McGraw-Hill, known in the industry as the “Big Three.”
Rather than starting at the bottom, selling directly to individual schools and teachers as many startup ed-tech companies were forced to do, Amplify sold its products just like the big textbook companies did, sending fleets of salespeople to peddle Amplify’s wares directly to school districts.
“I would like to disrupt the delivery model, too, eventually,” Amplify CEO Joel Klein told BuzzFeed News in April 2014. “But these things don’t happen overnight. You have to meet the market where it is, even if you’re a disruptor.”
But from the beginning, Amplify seemed to struggle to meet that market. Big players like Pearson, who have decades of experience in the industry, sell their products How Rupert Murdoch Suffered A Rare Defeat In American Classrooms - BuzzFeed News:
