Murdoch’s Dow Jones deal done
NEW YORK – Rupert Murdoch completed his $5 billion-plus deal to acquire Dow Jones & Co. on Thursday, adding the Wall Street Journal to his global media conglomerate News Corp. and ending a century of control by the Bancroft family.
Shareholders approved the deal by a margin of 60.3 percent. About 78 percent of the company’s publicly traded shares were voted for the deal, while 54 percent of the Class B shares, which are largely held by the Bancrofts, were in favor.
Later Thursday, Murdoch, Hinton and Thomson addressed several hundred Wall Street Journal reporters in the paper’s main newsroom. Murdoch, holding a microphone and standing on top of several boxes of copier paper, told the assembled crowd he had high hopes for the Journal’s future.
“I know that change is often difficult or creates nervousness,” Murdoch said, according to a News Corp. transcript. “If it’s particularly nervousness then certainly let us know. We’re very accessible people.”
The deal places Dow Jones into the fold of News Corp., which also owns the Fox broadcast network, Twentieth Century Fox, Fox News Channel, satellite TV businesses in Europe and Asia, MySpace, as well as a large group of newspapers in Murdoch’s native Australia, the United Kingdom and the New York Post.
The controlling shareholders of Dow Jones, the far-flung Bancroft family, had initially rebuffed Murdoch’s approach this spring, but eventually Murdoch was able to win over enough of them to assure the deal would be approved.
His price of $60 a share represented a premium of 65 percent over the value of Dow Jones shares immediately before the bid became public. Other than Dow Jones, the shares of many other newspaper publishers have declined sharply this year on concerns about their losing more advertising dollars to the Internet.
Several family members, as well as former board member Jim Ottaway Jr. and a union that represents Journal reporters, voiced concerns that the paper’s quality and independence would suffer under Murdoch.
Murdoch has said those concerns were unfounded, but he also agreed to set up an editorial oversight board to allay those worries.