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News Corp's Rupert Murdoch has spent a lifetime building a global media empire, but he is best known for tarting up tabloids with topless girls and screaming headlines from Sydney to London to New York.
Now the 76-year-old media mogul aims to redeem his legacy in the business he loves most with the US$5 billion purchase of Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal, Barron's financial weekly and Dow Jones Newswires.
Dow Jones has agreed to the buyout, regarded as one of the most audacious yet for the consummate dealmaker.
Murdoch wants to position himself as the saviour of the Journal, as newspapers face falling circulation and advertising.
He has never lacked for ideas. "What if, at the Journal, we spent US$100 million a year hiring all the best business journalists in the world?" Murdoch suggested in a recent Time magazine profile.
Here is another of Murdoch's musings on the future of the Journal: "And then you make it free, online only. No printing plants, no paper, no trucks."
But Murdoch's worst enemy may be his reputation for meddling in the day-to-day running of his papers.
From a pair of inherited newspapers in Australia, he built a far-flung and diverse empire of nearly 120 newspapers, film studios, television networks and internet properties, stirring controversy with his brash, populist journalism, but always seizing the chance to expand.
His approach has been to find value in overlooked properties, often taking big risks to rebuild or restructure neglected media companies in novel ways.
Murdoch at times has gone to the brink to finance his acquisitions, piling on so much debt that in the early 1990s he needed a major restructuring to survive.
Since then, his company's stock has gone up more than tenfold.
To get the Journal, he offered US$60 a share, a huge premium over Dow Jones' trading price in the mid-30s before the deal was announced.
Murdoch wants to propel the Journal brand across his media outlets, using it to fuel News Corp's coming Fox Business Channel and find fresh audiences on its MySpace online social network and mobile media ventures.
His father, Sir Keith Murdoch, died in 1953, leaving him to run the Adelaide News and Brisbane Courier-Mail.
Even then, associates at the Adelaide News complained as a keen 21-year-old Murdoch studied every aspect of the family business, according to biographer William Shawcross. "Rupert, in his sincere and charming way, has been making life somewhat wearing," Shawcross quoted an unnamed staff member as saying.
Murdoch has honed a relentless business style.
On London's Fleet St, he made his name as a cost-cutter and a union buster who let quality slip.
When he went after the Times of London, Murdoch gave written pledges that he would not alter the character of Britain's oldest daily newspaper.
These same fears haunted his three-month pursuit of Dow Jones and nearly scuppered talks with its controlling shareholder, the Bancrofts.
To help to seal the deal, he gave an independent board the power to approve editors nominated by News Corp. Murdoch and his deputies have also promised to stay out of the Journal's news pages.
The Journal may appear an odd choice for the owner of tabloids such as the New York Post, but Murdoch has always thumbed his nose at tradition.
His rebellious streak has its roots in his days at Geelong Grammar School in Victoria, where privileged schoolmates looked down on him because of his father's job.
"The sons of the landed gentry at Geelong considered journalism a low-rent business," the New Yorker's Ken Auletta wrote in a profile in 1995.
For all the accolades from investors, the billionaire still refers to himself as a newspaperman.
- REUTERS
