KEY POINTS:
Rupert Murdoch's US$5 billion ($6.5 billion)-plus bid for Dow Jones & Co, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, cleared its final hurdle as shareholders of the financial publishing company gave their approval yesterday.
The changeover is sure to bring significant changes to the Journal, starting with a new management team that was announced late last week. Longtime News Corp publishing executive Les Hinton will be chief executive, while Robert Thomson, editor of Murdoch's the Times newspaper in London, will be publisher. Several Dow Jones executives are departing, including CEO Richard Zannino.
Shareholders approved the deal by a margin of 60.3 per cent. About 78 per cent of the company's publicly traded shares were voted for the deal, while 54 per cent of the Class B shares, which are largely held by the Bancroft family, were in favour.
After the vote, Murdoch, Hinton and Thomson addressed several hundred Journal reporters in the 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 paper's future.
"I know that change is often difficult or creates nervousness," he said. "If it's particular nervousness, then certainly let us know. We're very accessible people.
"Our aim is pretty simple. We have to entertain, inform, enrich all our readers in their lives and in their businesses. We must be the pre-eminent source of financial informationand comment in the world."
Despite a general malaise affecting many US newspapers, Murdoch has said he sees major potential in Dow Jones with the booming demand worldwide for business news and information. He also intends to beef up the paper's online operations and Washington coverage, and may further open up the Journal's website to non-paying subscribers.
The deal places Dow Jones, which had been family-controlled for more than a century, into the fold of Murdoch's global media conglomerate News Corp, which owns the Foxbroadcast network, Twentieth Century Fox, Fox News Channel, satellite TV businesses in Europe and Asia, MySpace, as well as a large group of newspapers in Australia, and Britain and the New York Post.
The controlling shareholders of Dow Jones, the far-flung Bancroft family, had initially rebuffed Murdoch's approach, but eventually he was able to win over enough of them to assure the deal would be approved.
Murdoch's price of US$60 a share represented an extremely rich premium of 65 per cent 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 the companies losing more advertising dollars to the internet.
Murdoch won his campaign to acquire the company in early August after months of wrangling with the Bancroft family, who had controlled the publishing company for more than a century. The Bancrofts' roughly three dozen adult members are descended from the family of an early owner of Dow Jones, Clarence Barron.
The final stage of the deal was bittersweet for many at Dow Jones.
"I know I speak for so many today when I say that this has been a difficult, and for many a sad set of discussions," chairman Peter McPherson said closing the shareholder meeting. He added there were "great expectations and hopes" for the Journal and Dow Jones in the future.
Several family members, as well as former board member Jim Ottaway jnr and a union that represents Journal reporters, voiced concerns that the paper's quality and independence would suffer.
- AP
