July 17, 2007 5:15 AM
NewsCorp Inches Closer to Acquiring Dow Jones
It has been a rumor that is so big that it wouldn’t just die down. For a couple of months now, NewsCorp’s Rupert Murdoch have been courting the media publishing company Dow Jones, but the deal won’t seem to materialize since the rumor started.
But according to a BBC news report, the deal seemed to have taken off tentatively and NewsCorp might finally be getting Dow Jones for a whooping sum of $5 billion buyout stake. And it is but a matter of convincing the members of the Bancroft family, who has the voting rights to finally agree on NewsCorp’s bid of the company.
The bid which was publicly announced by Murdoch in May, has received quite a buzz on the interweb. Skeptics have lashed the bid as detrimental to the independence of Dow Jones as an independent media publishing company.
Would NewsCorp finally get the publishing company that it so badly wanted? Should the deal be sealed off, how is this going to affect Dow Jones flagship newspaper, the Wall Street Journal?
Aside from owning mySpace, NewsCorp also has other flagship news media such as the New York Post and the Sun and the Times in U.K. Are we seeing a CNN.com or BBC News.com where all the network’s media publications are lumped together into one portal?
There are a lot of implications of this pending buyout. And surely, Murdoch had it all planned out even before making the bid proposal to buy Dow Jones. We can only wait and do our little own second guessing at this time.
But what I could not imagine is how this buyout will impact NewsCorp's other corporate property, the social networking site mySpace. I would have to agree to Michael that indeed, the world is getting smaller.
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