There’s nothing ‘insane’ about his bid for the Wall Street Journal, says philip delves broughton |
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Trust Rupert Murdoch. Just one day after the US newspaper industry announced another dramatic slide in readership, he comes in with a $5bn bid for Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
Having lived through, and thrived through, many media revolutions, from Australia to Fleet Street, from cable and satellite to the internet, Murdoch is returning to his oldest passion, news and newspapers with a bullish roar. His move demonstrates yet again that, even in his 70s, he is the only media mogul capable of straddling old and new, local and global, online and offline with equal confidence and aggression.
By yesterday afternoon, the Bancroft family, which has owned Dow Jones for 105 years, had expressed its opposition to the deal. But no one in the family can object to the price. On Monday afternoon, Dow Jones' stock price |
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| Putting the Dow Jones brand behind his new business news channel would give it instant credibility |
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was $36.33. Murdoch is offering $60 per share, all in cash. By the end of Tuesday afternoon, speculators had driven the stock price up to $56.90, a strong vote of confidence in Murdoch’s chances of winning this fight.
The Bancrofts' objection appears to be largely aesthetic. Despite the fact that they share Murdoch's conservative beliefs, they despise his journalism. Having spent over a century guarding the Wall Street Journal's reputation and its tradition of serious journalism, they are loath to turn it over to the owner of Fox News and the Sun.
But the Bancrofts are in a bind, and Murdoch knows it. Dow Jones is their single biggest asset and they have been agitating for months over how to boost the lagging stock price, to no avail. Last year, the company had $1.78bn in revenue principally from the Journal, the Dow Jones newswire, Barron's, a weekly financial newspaper, and the MarketWatch website. But the company has suffered the fate of all major American newspaper companies. It has been  |
