Murdoch will do to WSJ what Newhouse did to New Yorker

New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera writes Saturday that when he thinks about News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch making the promises he has made to the Bancroft family in an attempt to purchase The Wall Street Journal, he thinks about the promises that S.I. Newhouse made when he bought The New Yorker.

Newhouse said that the magazine’s editor could stay and that the magazine would never be folded into Conde Nast, among aother promises. None of those lasted.

Nocera wrote, “Still, Mr. Newhouse made promises that he eventually reneged on. And he made them because he so badly wanted to own The New Yorker, viewing it as the ultimate prize.

“Which pretty much sums up how Mr. Murdoch feels about the prospect of owning The Wall Street Journal. He’s wanted it forever. He’ll promise just about anything to get his hands on it, including setting up a special editorial board that will protect the paper’s independence and integrity. But once he gets it, all bets are off. Of course he’s going to meddle — he’ll be the owner, for crying out loud, and he has very clear ideas about how a newspaper should look and feel and smell.

“This is not to say that Dow Jones won’t vastly improve under his stewardship. I can guarantee you that it will. The reason Dow Jones is going to be sold to someone almost no one connected to the company wants to sell it to is precisely because it has been so poorly run over the past quarter-century. If there is one thing Mr. Murdoch knows how to do, it’s run a media company. It’s just sad that it’s come to this, that’s all.”

Read more here. Nocera also writes about the palpable sense of sadness among Journal reporters and editors.