Dow Jones

So what's going on with this Dow Jones story, anyway? I'm a faithful reader of the Wall Street Journal, which DJ publishes, and a variety of other publications (and blogs) that discuss financial news, but I'm having a tough time keeping up here.

Rupert Murdoch wants to buy the WSJ. A lot of people are unhappy with that, for a lot of different reasons. Its been two and a half months now since the original offer (May 1) and there's no signed-and-sealed deal yet, so the forces of resistance to the feared Fox-ification of the WSJ are evidently having some impact. A retardant but likely not a brake.

My guess, in other words, is that the deal will go through. One odd recent twist was the report four days ago that Brad Greenspan and Ron Burkle are posing as white knights, talking about putting together an alternative offer. Burkle, a California-based supermarket magnate with ties to the Clinton family, may be interested in foiling a new growth spurt for the Murdoch/Fox empire. Or he may see the Dow Jones as a prize for himself. Or he may just be toying with the idea because he's a megalomanaic. Who knows these days?

Here's something I wrote about the Burkle-Clinton connection more than a year ago, on another incarnation of this blog.

http://cfaille.blog-city.com/a_pat_on_the_back_to_mickey_kaus.htm

So ... what's my point? Personally, I long for the days (though perhaps I view them through rose-tinted glasses) when newspapers were the property of men with distinctive outsized personalities, men who had perhaps memories of childhood toys named Rosebud. I long for those days not because those men were perfect (surely not!), but because the products of colorless homogenized bureaucratic corporations seem necessarily ... what's the word I want here ... bland.

I don't like bland with my news. Let's have a few more Hearsts, Pulitzers, and Colonel McCormicks in the world. Women as well as men next time around of course. The Wall Street Journal's recent business problems, the problems that have led it into "play" in the first place, are a part of that blandness. They need a personality at the helm.

Murdoch isn't the solution. He's manuveuring behind Fox here. Greenspan and Burkle? Ah, we might have something. Odd though they may be, and unlikely though their success here surely is, I think I've acquired a rooting interest in this fight.