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Murdoch Sends a Message
You have to wince again for the Bancroft family and its indecisiveness about selling Dow Jones & Co. to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
There went Rupert (and Roger Ailes) again yesterday, moving ahead. They are launching the Fox Business Network, with or without the Bancrofts’ beloved Wall Street Journal, on October 15.
No ifs, ands or buts. Murdoch is as decisive as the Bancrofts are not.
Their months of pussyfooting around Murdoch’s $5 billion offer to buy the company is indicative of why no other media company has emerged to outbid the relentless media magnate from Down Under.
The Wall Street Journal has shown little aptitude for burnishing its lustrous brand and executing its high-quality journalism in any other form of business besides the printed page.
Sure, its reporters appear on CNBC, the reigning business news network. But why wasn’t it Dow Jones and the Bancrofts that built a successful 24-hour business channel in the first place?
And how is it that the terminals that securities traders across the country rely on for fast electronic delivery of pricing, transaction and, yes, news to their desks has a Bloomberg brand on it, not Dow Jones? Screen media have passed the Bancrofts by.
Yet here they have on their doorstep a guy who knows how to pass others by.
Murdoch and News Corp. launched the Fox News Channel in 1996, with just 10 million households able to watch it. Ten years later, it’s watched by more TV viewers than the next two cable news channels alone. To wit, in the week of July 2, Fox News was watched by 1,176,000 viewers; CNN, 616,000 and MSNBC, 523,000.
It’s the same story in the Journal’s own medium, newsprint. Murdoch bought a failing tabloid in the U.S.’ largest market three decades ago, the New York Post. Now, while every other daily newspaper of any size is losing circulation, it is … as the august New York Times puts it … defying gravity, gaining 7.6% on weekdays and 6.2% on weekends.
And, after all this time, it finally passed its once far larger circulation tabloid rival, the Daily News, last fall. The Post now holds a lead of 725,000 to 718,000 on weekdays. Slim. But it’s still headed up, while everyone else is headed down.
Murdoch, if nothing else, plays to win. In tough competitive markets. Against seemingly long odds. And he figures out how to pass others by.
The Bancrofts are quite likely to rue the day when Murdoch walks away from buying Dow Jones, because of their dithering.
Because they’ll wake up one day to find him passing them by, some other way.
That’s the message he may well have sent Wednesday.
