Who owns WSJ matters to journalists, but not Wall Street

Allan Sloan writes in Wednesday’s Washington Post that journalists care about who owns The Wall Street Journal, but most people on Wall Street probably don’t.

Sloan, Newsweek’s Wall Street editor, wrote, “There’s a real difference between journalistic giants and stock market pygmies. That’s the lesson of Monday’s $5 billion hostile offer by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for Dow Jones, owner of the nation’s leading business newspaper, the Wall Street Journal.

“To most of us, of course, $5 billion is real money. But not to Wall Street. In a world in which you’ve got individual hedge fund managers and private-equity players knocking down more than $1 billion a year, a deal of this size wouldn’t rate much more than a yawn if the Wall Street Journal weren’t involved.”

And he concluded, “To those of us in journalism — and, I hope, to society as a whole — it really matters who owns journalistic trophies like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. But in the stock market, our business is insignificant. That’s a humbling thought, and not a particularly pleasant one.”

Read more here.