August 2, 2007 2:35 AM
NewsCorp Got Wall Street Journal for $5 Billion
Finally, the rumor that won’t die down has come true. Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. paid a handsome $5 billion to the Bancroft family, owner of Wall Street Journal. And so the next questions that await answers are:
1.) What will happen to the online WSJ?
2.) Will NewsCorp. make the online WSJ available for free?
3.) Will NewsCorp. lose its integrity as one of the world’s most read business newspaper?
Question number one and two are tied up with each other. Nobody knows yet as to what direction the online WSJ will take now that NewsCorp. has taken over. NewsCorp’s other media properties includes Fox Interactive, MySpace, and several major news dailies such as the New York Post in the U.S. and The Sun and The Times in the U.K. Will Murdoch merge NYP and WSJ to come up with one online news portal and subsequently make it freely available to the public?
Larry Kramer, founder of MarketWatch, a company which Murdoch purchased in 2006, says that “there is some number of people who will pay for premium business news, and those people will pay a lot.” And so it would be a good move on Newscorp. if it retain the current subscription to WSJ at $99/per year. I think this is a pretty much sensible argument, unless Murdoch doesn’t mind losing a big amount of money from subscription earnings from WSJ.
Question number three has something to do with the disagreement of some people who wanted the buyout not to materialize before. This people are questioning Murdoch’s motive in wanting to acquire the newspaper. But losing WSJ reader base after this buyout is yet to be seen. Some may get turned off knowing how flamboyant of a person Murdoch is. But there are still some who will not mind this buyout for as long as they get to read what they need to read in business newspaper.
In the end, it all depends on how Murdoch is planning to manage the Wall Street Journal, or if he really plans to maintain its status and popularity in the newspaper industry.
Leave a comment