Categories: OLD Media Moves

Why Dow Jones & Co. deserves Rupert Murdoch

David von Drehle of Time writes Monday that Dow Jones & Co., the parent of The Wall Street Journal, deserves to be sold to News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch.

Von Drehle wrote, “If Murdoch wins Dow Jones, it won’t be because he’s evil. It will be the result of decades of mismanagement of one of the world’s great sources of news and analysis. All the Journal‘s Pulitzer Prizes can’t mask the fact that, while demand for high-quality financial and political news exploded, the value of America’s leading business newspaper first sank, then stagnated.

“Wall Street’s judgment on Dow Jones ownership is pitiless. Investors in Murdoch’s News Corporation hardly batted an eye when the old man bid $60 a share for a company that has been south of $40 a share for years. That enormous premium is the financial community’s rough measure of the value of new management.

“The litany of Dow Jones stumbles and fumbles is well-known. As the hands-off Bancrofts watched from a distance, the company failed to move nimbly into the digital age. A single able entrepreneur, Michael Bloomberg, captured the desktop financial analysis business as Dow Jones dawdled. Meanwhile, a newspaper with huge circulation (over two million) and a relatively small staff (half the size of the Los Angeles Times) for some reason lagged the industry in profitability.”

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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