Categories: OLD Media Moves

Ottaway predicts that Dow Jones won't sell

Leon Lazaroff of Bloomberg News interviewed James Ottaway Jr., whose family owns 5.2 percent of Dow Jones & Co. stock, and he predicted that the company would not sell to News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch.

Lazaroff wrote, “‘I’m quite optimistic that we’ll be able to stop Murdoch,’ Ottaway, a former Dow Jones board member, said today in an interview. ‘We’re not forced to sell, and there’s not another offer on the table.’

“The Ottaways have owned shares of New York-based Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, since they sold their community newspapers to the company in 1970. The Bancroft family, which traces its control of Dow Jones to 1902, holds 64 percent of the votes and has said members controlling 52 percent oppose the $5 billion buyout offer from Murdoch’s News Corp.

“Opposition to Murdoch’s $60-a-share offer among members of the Bancroft family ‘seems pretty solid,’ Ottaway said. ‘They’ve known about this for a month. There’s been plenty of time to waffle if they wanted to, and they haven’t.””

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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.