Categories: OLD Media Moves

Bancrofts, Murdoch will meet on Monday

Richard Perez-Pena of The New York Times writes for Saturday’s paper that Bancroft family member Leslie Hill is the one who pushed other members to talk to News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch about his offer to buy the company they control, Dow Jones & Co., the parent of The Wall Street Journal.

Perez-Pena wrote, “On Friday, May 25, Michael Elefante, a family lawyer and Dow Jones board member, told M. Peter McPherson, the company’s chairman, that the Bancrofts wanted to meet with the board. What he did not reveal was that privately, a new consensus had emerged: family members arrived at the board meeting Thursday carrying a draft of a statement, released that evening, saying that they had decided to meet with the News Corporation.

“The meeting will take place Monday at noon, according to people close to the board and the family, nearly all of whom were granted anonymity. Family members say that at least some of them have signed confidentiality agreements.

“The decision to meet with the News Corporation could be a pivotal moment in the history of a company that the family has owned for more than a century. Family members are already discussing ways that in any takeover an internal governing board might be created to protect the news pages of Dow Jones’s centerpiece, The Wall Street Journal, from the influence of Mr. Murdoch, whose brand of journalism they disdain.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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