Natalie Bancroft, News Corp.'s newest board member, is standing in a hotel parking lot belting out the opening notes of "In the Silence of the Night." The song is by Rachmaninoff, her favorite composer, and showcases Bancroft's dramatic mezzo-soprano, a vocal type with great power and a broad range. Before starting to sing, she chooses an isolated corner and warns, "I'm noisy."

Bancroft, heiress to the Dow Jones fortune, doesn't usually perform in public. At least not yet. An aspiring opera singer, conservatory trained, she's currently working with a private teacher. Her voice, she says, is still developing. When she does sing for others, it's in small church performances, recitals, or for friends and family at her father's home in Rancho Santa Fe, California.

But today, Bancroft is game—or wants to show off her talent. The impulse is understandable, given the events of the past few months. Last October, Bancroft was handpicked by Rupert Murdoch to fill a News Corp. board seat after the company bought Dow Jones & Co. from her family for $5.6 billion. Public reaction to her appointment ranged from disbelief to ridicule. The Wall Street Journal, the prize holding of Dow Jones, dismissed her in news coverage as a "relative neophyte." Experts in corporate governance predicted that she would end up planning the board Christmas party. Even an opera website run by a drag queen weighed in, questioning in a post whether Bancroft should be considered an opera singer at all. (Meet the other members of the News Corp. board.)

The appointment looked like a classic last-minute end run by Murdoch around the Bancrofts. The family had owned Dow Jones since 1928, when Hugh Bancroft, Natalie's great-grandfather, inherited the Journal from his father-in-law, Clarence Walker Barron. (The former Boston-based correspondent had bought the company from its founders in 1902.) Although Murdoch's bid represented a 65 percent premium over Dow Jones stock, the family spent months bickering and soul-searching before it agreed to sell. One factor that gave the Bancrofts comfort was Murdoch's offer to create a News Corp. board position for a family representative. The Bancrofts thought it would be a way to help them keep a hand in the business, and they believed that they would have a say in the board-selection process. Instead, Murdoch didn't even interview their nominees; he simply handed the job to Natalie. Not only did she lack support from her relatives, she had little history of involvement with Dow Jones and no business or professional journalism experience.

"I know that me as a choice was kind of scandalous—this 27-year-old opera singer that no one knows anything about," Bancroft says. While bloggers and newspaper journalists were debating her qualifications, Bancroft, who lives in London, declined all interview requests. Now she wants to set the record straight. "There's been people saying, 'She's going to be a potted plant and a pushover.' The last thing I am is a pushover," she says. "I'm not just some idiotic girl in piggytails yodeling."

Natalie Bancroft certainly wasn't groomed for service on a powerful corporate board. The daughter of Joyce Bancroft, a Dutch-Brazilian model, and Hugh Bancroft III, a Formula Two racecar driver, Natalie grew up splitting her time between Southern California, France, and Switzerland. The night she was born, her father was finishing the drawings for a car he designed, the Bancroft Roadster, a prototype of which was eventually shown at the 1990 and 1991 Geneva auto shows. When Bancroft was five, she moved to Europe with her parents, who divorced three years later, in 1988.

Bancroft gravitated to music early. As a toddler, she began playing the piano and was soon studying two hours a day. She carried a Fisher-Price cassette player, usually blasting Rachmaninoff, everywhere. At 10, she started singing lessons; at 16, she decided on a career as an opera singer. Her parents agreed to her choice as long as she finished high school, which she did in 1998. Over the next few years, Bancroft studied with private vocal instructors and, in 2002, enrolled at L'Institut de Ribaupierre, a conservatory in Lausanne, Switzerland. Last spring, she graduated and returned to studying privately.

At 5-feet-10, her wide eyes rimmed in black, Bancroft is an odd mix of confidence, wariness, and innocence. She expresses strong opinions about her family, for example, yet refuses to reveal her birth city. (Her father says it's Newport Beach, California.) Ticking off her qualifications to serve on the News Corp. board, she points out that she grew up in Europe, has a flexible schedule (she commutes to Milan for voice classes every few weeks), and sleeps only three to five hours a night. She also says she is multilingual and routinely reads foreign-language newspapers. Instead of being intimidated by the accomplished men who will be her colleagues, she says the prospect thrills her: "I have a much easier time understanding men. I was a tomboy. I love camping. I love sailing. I love doing boy stuff."

Is she planning to get an M.B.A. to help prepare for the position? "In journalism?" she asks.

Murdoch's offer to create a board seat for a family representative was part of his overture in early April of last year. The deal progressed in fits and starts but was finally accepted by the Bancrofts at the end of July. At that point, the focus of discussions shifted to finding board nominees. Candidates discussed by family members ranged from Paul Steiger, a longtime managing editor of the Journal, to John Carroll, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times. Murdoch was initially pulling for Bancroft family member Elizabeth Steele, who was in charge of the board-nomination process.

But neither Steiger nor Steele wished to be considered. News Corp. rejected Carroll, adding the stipulation that the representative should be a family member. With no one selected as of September, the Bancrofts decided that interested family members should nominate themselves. Three threw their hats into the ring: Michael Hill, a second cousin of Bancroft's who had been active at Dow Jones; Elisabeth Chelberg, an equestrian cousin known for past activism against the company's management; and Bancroft herself, who put her name forward in a four-line email to the family.

"There were better candidates than me by far, but they weren't in the running," she says. "I wouldn't say I was excited. There were so many negotiations going on, and the family was screwing it up right and left. My focus was more on, Jesus Christ, how am I related to these people?"

In an official family email poll taken in late September, Hill, an environmental scientist from Boston, came in first. Chelberg came in second. Out of 35 eligible family members (the exact number who voted is not clear), Bancroft garnered two votes, hers and her father's. Though Murdoch was notified of the family's choice, he never interviewed either Hill or Chelberg. Instead, he met with Bancroft privately, having been introduced by Andrew Steginsky, a News Corp. investor and a longtime Murdoch acquaintance who also happened to be friendly with Billy Cox III, Natalie's second cousin. According to someone familiar with the situation, it was Steginsky who suggested to Natalie that she run for the board seat in the first place.

In late October, unbeknownst to the rest of the family, Lon Jacobs, News Corp.'s general counsel, and Viet Dinh, a News Corp. board member and head of the nominating committee, flew to London to vet Bancroft at Murdoch's request. Jacobs and Dinh spent a morning with her, explaining the requirements of the job over breakfast. In a pro forma followup, Bancroft sat down with representatives of  Willkie Farr & Gallagher, News Corp.'s outside legal counsel, to fill out a questionnaire to evaluate her fitness as an independent board member. 

In November, Steele and a family lawyer broke the news of Bancroft's selection to the clan in a painfully straight-faced email later published in the Journal. It read, in part, "While News Corp. is aware that other members of the family received more support from within the family, News Corp. has interviewed Natalie and elected to nominate her. We trust that Natalie will endeavor to represent effectively the family's interests on the News Corp. board." The family's reaction to the news was "mixed," says Hugh Bancroft, Natalie's father, and few congratulatory phone calls trickled in. One of those was placed by Michael Hill, who praises his cousin's "tenacity" but says the position was rightfully his. "I was the family representative, by majority vote. I think I would've been a good board candidate. Not to take anything away from Natalie. Obviously she hasn't been involved historically as much as I have, because she's not as old," says Hill, 47.

The question now is how this musical child of jet-set privilege will interact with News Corp.'s powerful board, which oversees a $64 billion media empire. So far, Bancroft has met her future colleagues just once, at a dinner in December. She is the only woman and the youngest by almost a decade; the member closest to her in age is James Murdoch, one of Rupert's sons, who is 35 and heads News Corp.'s European and Asian operations. Her other colleagues include Thomas Perkins, the 76-year-old venture capitalist; Rod Paige, 74, the former U.S. secretary of Education; and José María Aznar, 55, the former prime minister of Spain.

During her two-year term, Bancroft will be paid $195,000 annually in cash and stock. (She is up for re-election in 2010, and according to the terms of sale, News Corp. will maintain a position on its board for a family representative until 2018.) She appears to be doing her homework: She has already traveled to Los Angeles on News Corp. business and is studying the company's board books. Among other initiatives, Bancroft plans to reach out to senior management at News Corp. and to meet with journalists. She also says she will resume a journalism course that she enrolled in after high school but never completed, at the London School of Journalism. "I'm working my little butt off," she says.

Only a few of Bancroft's fellow board members will speak about her publicly. Stanley Shuman, managing director at Allen & Co., an investment firm, says she's "bright and serious." Through a spokesman, Rupert Murdoch concurs, saying she has "already shown great energy and interest in all aspects of the business." Yet the impact Bancroft will have on the 17-member board is questionable. Murdoch is a notoriously hands-on C.E.O., and the board makes its decisions by majority vote, so a few holdouts don't matter. In addition, Bancroft brings little business savvy to the table. "Her profile is different," says Charles Elson, director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. "She's young, and her experience range hasn't been in corporate enterprises." Though Bancroft is just one director out of many, Elson adds, "I can't imagine, if you're a shareholder, this is something you would be particularly excited about."

One reason Hugh Bancroft thinks Murdoch chose Natalie for the director's job over other relatives is that she was willing to move the company forward. Unlike Michael Hill, Hugh believes, his daughter also understands what her role will be. It's not "someone pounding their chest as a Dow Jones representative," he says. "You're a News Corp. employee. Natalie's job is not to run to the family." Hugh was always in favor of selling the company to Murdoch and modernizing Dow Jones. "Hell, we invented the ticker tape," he says. "Why don't we go on from there?"

Natalie's position wasn't finalized until December, when the sale went through, and she is still adjusting to her newfound notoriety. Though looking forward to her service—her first board meeting was scheduled for February 12—she remains focused on her singing career. "I could not live without doing music," she says. "That's the priority in my life, no question about it." She is having new headshots made and has auditioned for various opera companies. And while she says her artistic career and her News Corp. duties have nothing to do with each other, in a funny way, there is a link.

"The Wall Street Journal makes me think of opera," she points out. "People are afraid of it."