After more than a year of scandal in his British newspaper empire, Rupert Murdoch has resigned his directorships in a string of companies that control titles that include The Sun tabloid, The Times and The Sunday Times, The New York Times reported.


A company spokeswoman said Saturday that Mr. Murdoch, the 81-year-old founder of the News Corporation, resigned last week as a director of the NI Group, the Times Newspaper Holdings, and Newscorp Investments in Britain. Those companies are subsidiaries of the News Corporation, Mr. Murdoch’s $53 billion New York-based company whose assets include The Wall Street Journal, the


Fox Broadcasting television networks and the 20th Century Fox film company.


Apparently eager to calm disquiet among thousands of staff members at the British newspapers, who received a corporate e-mail confirming Mr. Murdoch’s moves on Saturday, the company offered assurances that Murdoch and his family had no immediate plans to sever their connection to the newspapers. The British newspapers were central to building Mr. Murdoch’s fortune in the years after he expanded his media holdings beyond his native Australia, and before he moved on to expanding his empire with far more profitable enterprises in the United States.


“Last week, Mr. Murdoch stepped down from a number of boards, many of them small subsidiary boards, both in the UK and US,” a spokeswoman for News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of the News Corporation, said Saturday, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with company policy.


She described Murdoch’s resignations from the British directorships as “nothing more than a corporate housecleaning exercise” ahead of the restructuring announced last month that will split News Corporation into two separate entities. One company will consist primarily of newspapers and other print assets, while the other will own the far more profitable television and film enterprises. The latter businesses generated an operating profit of $4.6 billion in the fiscal year that ended June 2011, more than five times what the publishing businesses earned.