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overview
holdings
landmarks
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overview
This profile considers the Dow Jones group, best known
for ownership of the Wall Street Journal.
It
was acquired by News Corporation in 2007.
It covers -
introduction
The Dow Jones group centres on the Wall Street Journal
but encompasses online services, a handful of business
journals and minor newspapers under the Ottaway Newspapers
umbrella. It has diversified more than the London Financial
Times (FT).
Its corporate site is here.
The following page provides an
indication of Dow Jones holdings.
Wall Street Journal
The
Wall Street Journal (WSJ) boasted an average
paid circulation of around 1.8 million in 2002. Throughout
its history it has been noted for its upbeat stance on
US capitalism, serious coverage of business and more problematical
coverage of those who didn't share the faith (eg a somewhat
conspiracist approach to Bill Clinton that wasn't matched
by critical scrutiny of Reagan or Bush Sr and Jr). Overall
it is the US financial sector 'paper of record'.
development
Dow Jones & Company was founded in 1882 by reporters Charles
Dow (1851-19020, Edward Jones (1856-1920) and Charles
Bergstresser. Jones converted the small Customers'
Afternoon Letter into The Wall Street Journal,
first published in 1889, and began delivery of the Dow
Jones News Service via telegraph. The Journal featured
the Jones 'Average', the first of several indexes of stock
and bond prices on the New York Stock Exchange.
Journalist Clarence Barron (1855-1928) purchased control
of the company in 1902 for $130,000; circulation was then
around 7,000 but climbed to 50,000 by the end of the 1920s.
He had created the Boston News Bureau as a financial reporting
specialist in 1887, going on to establish a similar news
service in Philadelphia in 1896. Barron's National
Business & Financial Weekly was launched in 1921.
Chris Roush dismissed some of the pieties in 2007 with
the comment that Barron's
Journal was one of the loudest cheerleaders
of the stock market run-up of the 1920s that led to
the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression.
Barron was too close to many of the Wall Street titans
whom his newspaper covered. As former Forbes
and Columbia Journalism Review editor Marshall
Loeb wrote for Time magazine in 1988, "Clarence
Walker Barron, 5 ft. 5 in. and 300 lbs. in his prime,
was a high-living, big-investing champion of unrestrained
capitalism who improved the Journal's standards
while ordering up stories promoting companies whose
shares he owned." The Journal's slogan
in the early 20th century was the "Newspaper for
the Investor," with Barron being that investor
in many cases.
In the 1970s, Dow Jones acquired the Ottaway group of
community newspapers. Earlier moves into consumer publishing
had been unsuccessful. Ottaway was subsequently described
as serving to "mitigate the impact of sharp but cyclical
business-advertising declines" at the WSJ.
the shape of Ottaway has changed: the
Joplin Globe, Portsmouth Herald, Ashland
Daily Independent and Mankato Free Press
were for example sold to CNHI for
US$182 million in 2002 and a year later Ottaway acquired
the Stockton Record from Omaha World-Herald Co
for US$144 million.
Dow expanded outside the US, taking a stake in the Far
Eastern Economic Review (founded 1946) and establishing
The Asian Wall Street Journal in 1976. The Wall
Street Journal Europe, published in Brussels,was launched
in 1983.
In 1998 it sold its ailing Telerate financial data service
to Reuters and Bloomberg
competitor Bridge Information Systems.
In 1992 it launched SmartMoney magazine with Hearst.
The Wall Street Journal Online was launches as WSJ.com
in 1996. In 1997 it established CNBC, a global business
television alliance with NBC. In
1999 Dow Jones and Holtzbrinck
agreed to swap stakes in The Wall Street Journal Europe
and Handelsblatt, Germany's major business
newspaper.
The Wall Street Journal Sunday (focused on personal
finance and careers) began publication as syndicated content
in major US metropolitan Sunday newspapers in 1999. In
that year Dow Jones launched Vedomosti (The Record)
a business newspaper in Russia.
As of April 2007 Bancroft family trusts (representing
three dozen or so members of the family) owned 24.7% of
Dow Jones stock but controlled 64.2% of the votes through
supervoting shares. Rupert Murdoch's
News Corporation made a US$5 billion takeover bid, commenting
that in 2006 Dow Jones made US$81 million after tax and
paid US$80 million in dividends: "you can't grow
a company that way".
US supermarket magnate Ron Burkle and internet entrepreneur
Brad Greenspan expressed interest but failed to offer
a substantive proposals. General Electric and Pearson
explored a joint bid but could not justify the price.
Descendants of Clarence Barron, controlling 64% of the
company through a special class of share with extra voting
power, publicly fretted about editorial independence but
eventually succumbed, apparently after News Corp's agreement
to take on some of the $30m legal costs that Bancroft
family trusts incurred over the preceding four months.
Media analyst Ed Atorino sniffed "So much for principles.
After all the high-minded concerns about editorial interest
and journalistic excellence, it gets down to who pays
the legal fees for the Bancrofts."
Author Steve Coll commented
the Bancrofts failed because they proved incompetent
in the sphere that belonged to them as owners. This
involved the adaptation of their inherited newspaper
business model to support deep and independent reporting
in the digital age.
The urgency of this mission has been clear since at
least the mid-nineteen-nineties. As newspaper circulation
fell, computing and telecommunications merged, and the
Internet arrived with all the subtlety of a supernova.
The business readers and the financial-market participants
crucial to Dow Jones lived and worked at the forefront
of these changes. Yet for years the Bancrofts coddled
a chief executive at Dow Jones, Peter R. Kann, who,
although he was a likable man and a talented journalist,
could not find a winning strategic path.
As the Bancrofts dozed and Kann floundered, Michael
Bloomberg erected a skyscraper
of a company on Dow Jones’s front lawn. He did
this by pioneering the use of new technologies to profitably
speed up and deliver business information. Dow Jones
might have recovered from any number of mistakes, but
it could not overcome its failure to dominate the profitable
sale of electronic financial data. This ultimately laid
the company bare for Murdoch, a master of technological
change. Crawford Hill, a member of the Bancroft family
who works as a biology teacher, summed up this background
acutely in an e-mail to others in the family, reported
last week by the Journal: “We are actually now
paying the price for our passivity over the past twenty-five
years.”
studies
The Power & the Money (New York: Birch Lane Press
1993) by Francis X Daly is a warts & all study of
the Wall Street Journal. More serious treatment
is given in Worldly Power: The Making of the Wall Street
Journal (New York: Beaufort 1986) by Edward Scharff.
Jerry Rosenberg's Inside the Wall Street Journal: The
History and the Power of Dow Jones & Co. & America's
Most Influential Newspaper (New York: Macmillan 1988)
is thinner but more entertaining than Lloyd Wendt's The
Wall Street Journal: The Story of Dow Jones & the
Nation's Business Newspaper (Chicago: Rand McNally
1982), an official history. For the environment see John
Steel Gordon's The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall
Street As A World Power (New York: Scribners 1999),
Howard Wachtel's Street of Dreams, Boulevard of Broken
Hearts: Wall Street's First Century (London: Pluto
Press 2003), Doug Henwood's Wall Street (London:
Verso 1997) and studies highlighted in the News services
pages.
A point of reference for the early years is provided by
Douglas Steeples' Advocate for American Enterprise:
William Buck Dana and the Commercial and Financial Chronicle,
1865-1910 (Westport: Greenwood Press 2002).
 next
page (Dow Jones holdings)
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