Categories: OLD Media Moves

Winners and losers in WSJ purchase by Murdoch

Stephen Foley of The Independent newspaper in London has his list of winners and losers once News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch completes his apparent purchase of Dow Jones & Co., the parent of The Wall Street Journal.

They include:

Bloomberg, Reuters/Thomson: Thanks to the ‘Journal’ and the upcoming Fox Business Channel, News Corp is likely to focus Dow Jones on consumers rather than the data fiends these companies cater to. That may not have been so under a different owner.

‘WSJ’ unions: Murdoch is talking expansion, so ‘Journal’ staffers can feel safer than they might have under a different owner. Then again, News Corp has never been a great friend of labour.

‘BusinessWeek’, ‘Fortune’, ‘Forbes’, CondÃ© Nast portfolio: A recharged ‘Wall Street Journal’ sales team means more competition for advertisers. One possible upside: claiming journalistic high ground over Murdoch’s ‘WSJ’.

CNBC: Remember how upstart Fox News quickly overtook CNN? Then you know why CNBC is nervous. A News Corp acquisition of Dow Jones’s talent could Fox snatch more audiences and ad dollars. Is there room for two business channels?

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.