Five people have been picked to comprise a board designed to protect the journalism published in The Wall Street Journal from interference by News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, who is purchasing its parent company Dow Jones & Co. for $5 billion, writes Richard Perez-Pena of The New York Times.
Perez-Pena wrote, “They are Louis D. Boccardi, former executive editor, and then a president and chief executive, of The Associated Press; Thomas Bray, a columnist and former editorial page editor of The Detroit News; Jennifer Dunn, a former Republican congresswoman from Washington State; Jack Fuller, former president of Tribune Publishing and editorial page editor of The Chicago Tribune; and Nicholas Negroponte, former chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and a founder of Wired magazine.
“‘I think that at least on paper, this is a good step toward building a firewall around the content of The Journal,’ said Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. ‘I’d have liked to see more experience on the news side, in addition to the editorial side, but we’ll just have to wait and see what its impact will be.’
“People briefed on the process said that top Journal editors and members of the Bancroft family, who own a controlling stake in Dow Jones, played a significant role in making the choices.
“They said that four of the five committee members were first proposed by Dow Jones, while Mr. Negroponte was proposed by the News Corporation.”
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