After years adrift, Motown and Def Jam are seeking new leadership to restore their mojo.

As early as next week Universal Music Group, Motown’s parent, will tap Ethiopia Habtemariam to head the label, people close to the matter confirm to TheWrap.

A top executive from Universal’s music-publishing arm, Habtemariam (photo below) in early 2010 was responsible for wooing Justin Bieber into a global publishing deal.

Similarly, the appointment of an uber-artistic leader is looming at Def Jam, also owned by Universal Music Group, though no final candidate has yet been chosen.

The world’s largest music company is said to be narrowing a list of...

Did Rupert Murdoch survive a close shave in Tuesday's hacking hearings?

Maybe, but in testimony before the British Parliament, he came off as a spent mogul.

"He seemed to me to be showing his age," observed Sarah Ellison, author of "War at the Wall Street Journal," a riveting account of Murdoch's takeover of the business newspaper. "It was obvious to everyone -- the excruciating pauses. If he gained anything, it was sympathy."

In a nearly three-hour appearance with his son James at a Parliamentary committee hearing into the phone-hacking scandal, Murdoch's responses...

A harsh spotlight is falling on Rupert Murdoch in the latter chapter of a visionary, but controversial career in which he has personified his empire like no publisher since William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer in the late 1800s.

“We have let one man have far too great a sway over our national life,” an indignant Labour Party member, Chris Bryant, declared when the latest revelations from the years-long scandal thrust News Corp. into acute crisis management the past 24 hours.

For a mogul that seems to relish the power that comes with money, not the money that brings power, it is a devastating turn to be brought low by hacking, a thoroughly new-era crime, in a media segment that has...

Rupert Murdoch, Big Man on Campus?

Just seven months after his surprising expansion into reading, writing and arithmetic with the $360-million acquisition of Wireless Generation, News Corp.'s chairman and CEO seems intent on making the grade in what could be the future of education -- economized, customized, data-driven digitized instruction. 

Potentially at stake: hundreds of billions of dollars.  

“We have the resources to play and do what we need,” said Joel Klein, the innovative former New York City schools chief now on News Corp.'s board and CEO of Murdoch’s Education Division.

And Klein (below) is seriously scouting...