Foxy Dow Jones
So Rupert Murdoch has made a "surprise" bid for Dow Jones. I say "surprise", because it has been common knowledge for years that Mr. Murdoch has coveted Dow Jones and its premiere publication, The Wall Street Journal. From previous posts, you may know that I am a former Dow Jones/WSJ employee. What do I think about a potential sale of Dow Jones?

Rupert Murdoch could hardly do more damage to Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal than the Bancroft family has over the years. They should take the money and run -- something they have excelled at over the years. This past year Dow Jones earned $88 millions dollars and then paid out $80 million in dividends to, guess who?

When I worked at the firm, the big scandal was that CEO Peter Kann had married an insider, Karen Elliott House, and promptly boosted her career into the stratosphere. We'd just shuttered a printing plant (one of 17) and began the first of numerous ad sales office closings. The paper had just started printing color advertisements -- color having been a recent invention, at least to those running the show. The main hang up was, of course, the need to spend capital on the production equipment needed to support color. Circulation has continued its downward trend in the years since, but the firm has one of the what must be a very few profitable charged-for newspaper web sites. Friends of mine have faced layoffs, the company's reluctance to spend capital on improvements essentially handed the wire-service and custom electronic news segment to Bloomberg. Recently the paper itself has shrunken to weekly reader size (covered earlier in my blog) on its relentless trek towards Charmin two-ply size and quality, no doubt.

In short, the business has been managed in order to maximize profits, while minimizing capital expenditures. What's so bad about that? Well, the Bancrofts seem to want to claim some special protectorship role for the "public good" that is Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. What a laugh! They've run the business like any other and haven't done all that great a job of it. Staff morale, at least outside of the Pulitzer prize-winning newsroom and the rarified air of the opinion page offices, is in the crapper and has been for years.

I say, sell the whole thing to Rupert Murdoch for a king's ransom and shake the old place up. It has needed it for years!