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News & Updates - Tuesday, May 1, 2007

News Corp. + Dow Jones Is Now Shaky. Expect To See Google, Yahoo, MSFT Too.

UPDATE: Dow Jones just put out a release saying that more than 50% of shareholders will vote against the deal. That means the owners are walking away from an additional $1.5B that was added to the company's value today. (Editor's note: These newspaper owners are nuts).

The big business story today is News Corp.'s offer to buy-out Dow Jones. Dow Jones share are way as much as 60% on the news. News Corp. wants Dow Jones to help it with the launch of Fox Business News. It apparently believes that it can better run Dow Jones, which ironically has a poor reputation for operational efficiency.

Porter Bibb on CNBC is now speculating that private equity as well as Yahoo, Google, and or Microsoft/MSNBC will enter the bidding.

Public companies are not our coverage area here but selfishly we like this merger as we think it makes our indie media brethren more powerful. We do think that media consumers will come to distrust a habit of getting too much of their business news from one company, especially one controlled by an agenda-driven Rupert Murdoch.

BusinessWeek today reports that "among the most closely followed blogs are Arrington's TechCrunch, Rafat Ali's PaidContent, and Om Malik's GigaOM." Even though "These bloggers are still dwarfed by traditional media sites." These guys get more traffic than traditional media realizes and we think they will become a valued counter-weight to the dead wood roll-ups.

Traditional Media's Conflicting Interests (via NewsVisual)

Read - News Corp. Offers $60 a Share In Unsolicited Bid for Dow Jones (WSJ)
Read - Dow Jones: News Corp. Offers To Buy Us For $60 a Share (Barrons)