Dow Jones in final days before Murdoch and lieutenants take over

NEW YORK — By the end of this week, the world's best-known chronicle of capitalism, The Wall Street Journal, will be owned by another company — something many thought would never happen.

For more than a century, the Journal's parent company, Dow Jones & Co., was controlled by the Bancroft family, descendants of Clarence Barron, one of the earliest owners of the storied financial publishing company.

The family was long seen as unified in opposition to selling and at first rebuffed the extremely rich offer from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which valued the company at more than $5 billion, well above where Dow Jones stock was trading.

In the end, Murdoch won over enough family members to acquire Dow Jones and its flagship paper. News Corp. formally seals the deal with a vote by Dow Jones shareholders Thursday, but the outcome is assured since enough of the Bancrofts have entered binding commitments of support.

The deal should close quickly because it has already received the necessary regulatory approvals.

Guessing how the sale will affect the paper has been Topic A in the U.S. publishing industry since Aug. 1, when the agreement was announced.

The first inklings came late last week, when News Corp. appointed a new management team for Dow Jones, including longtime News Corp. publishing executive Les Hinton as CEO and Robert Thomson, editor of the Murdoch-owned Times of London, as publisher.

News Corp. declined to make its executives available for interviews, but outgoing Dow Jones CEO Richard Zannino said Murdoch and his News Corp. team were sure to bring a healthy appetite for risk to Dow Jones.

"The culture at News Corp. is one of partnering and taking prudent business risks, and they have a balance sheet to fund investment," Zannino said in an interview.

Murdoch's record of successful risk-taking is clear. His Fox News Channel eventually took over CNN in the ratings war among all-news cable networks, he just launched a Fox-branded business news network, and the $580 million News Corp. paid in 2005 for the online hangout MySpace, well before social networks became the Internet's hottest trend, turned out to be a bargain.

One of the most respected publications in the world, the Journal also is part of a company that many saw as having made a number of key missteps, including ceding ground to Reuters Group PLC and Bloomberg LP in the electronic delivery of news and financial data.

The Journal has gone through many changes in recent years, adding color and lifestyle coverage, moving to a narrower format, launching a Saturday edition and building its Web site into the most successful paid destination of any newspaper. But far more change is sure to come.

At The Times of London, Murdoch and his lieutenants took another risk in moving the paper from a broadsheet to a "compact" or tabloid format, which many readers say they find easier to hold and read.

Thomson took over as editor of The Times in 2002, and the paper has outsold its competitors on the newsstand consistently over the past three years, News Corp. said. Prior to that, Thomson was editor of the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, where he went up against the Journal.

John Andrews, a longtime British journalist who worked at The Economist for 24 years and now is a consulting editor there, said that Thomson has "tightened" The Times and that its move to the smaller format has been a commercial success.

"The Times was in danger of losing a lot of its authority" at the time Thomson took over, Andrews said. "It hasn't regained the authority it had in its glory days, but it's been a better paper under Robert Thomson's leadership."

As Murdoch announced the new Dow Jones leadership, he also clarified the line of succession at News Corp., naming his 34-year-old son James to a new senior role overseeing the media conglomerate's operations in Asia and Europe, putting him clearly in line to succeed his father, who is 76.

The younger Murdoch will also rejoin News Corp.'s board and relinquish his post as CEO of British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC, a satellite TV company in which News Corp. owns a 39 percent stake.

Even before the official hand-over to News Corp., Dow Jones has been moving to further transform itself and lessen its reliance on traditional newspaper advertising, which is widely seen as a threatened revenue source as ad dollars move to the Internet.

In late November, Dow Jones said it would expand the launch of a glossy lifestyle magazine called Pursuits to make it a global publication. It also said it would complete its exit from the community newspaper business. Jim Ottaway Jr., whose family founded that business and sold it to Dow Jones, opposed selling to Murdoch and says he still plans to vote his family's 7 percent stake against the deal.

Murdoch has given some general indications about his plans for the Journal but has declined to go into detail. He has said that he wants to greatly expand the paper's Washington and national coverage in order to compete more aggressively against The New York Times and that he wants to expand the Journal's operations online.

Murdoch also plans to expand overseas, particularly in Asia and Europe, where the Journal can go up against Pearson PLC's Financial Times.

Murdoch's investments in Dow Jones comes at a time of general contraction in the newspaper business as readers and advertisers flock to a variety of information sources on the Internet.

Lou Ureneck, a chair of the journalism department at Boston University, said depressed newspaper stock prices and general malaise about the industry's future gave Murdoch an opening.

"I don't think this sale would have occurred 10 years ago," Ureneck said. "This is a window between a prosperous past and a likely prosperous future, and in that window Murdoch was able to gain this prize."