Missed the Boat

Thomson Corp. and Rupert Murdoch came, they saw, but will they conquer?
This last week saw both Thomson Corporation, an information company, and Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corporation, bid for ownership of the Reuters PLC which owns the Reuters newswire service and Dow Jones Co. which would include its financial newswire service Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal. Both are sizable bids, Thomson's is over $16 billion and Murdoch's bid is $5 billion. Neither bid is entirely good news as it means two more major publicly traded news companies would come under control of a few people (Thomson Corp is run and owned by the wealthy Canadian Thomson family) or even one person (Rupert Murdoch, the Darth Vader of the news industry), increasing the commonality for partisan news and a media mainly interested in entertainment and profit. Both The Wall Street Journal and Reuters carry a long history of strong, ethical reporting with as few blemishes as possible. Reuters is one of the oldest newswires in the world (the oldest being the French Agence France-Presse) and the Journal is one of the oldest financial newspapers in the world. Both are major players in their field, the Journal being the most widely circulated newspaper in the U.S. and Reuters having been the largest financial newswire in the world until recently -Bloomberg LP currently holds the number one spot.
Under the circumstances though, the situation couldn't be better. While the majority shareholders of Dow Jones, the Bancroft family, along with former publisher Jim Ottoway jr., and the Journal newsroom all passionately oppose the governance of a media overlord infamous for implementing his opinion in a field ideally devoid of opinion, Reuters officials are in peaceful negotiations with Thomson about combining. This is unsurprising, Murdoch is the leader of an empire of misinformation news and Thomson Co. is an information company with a history of owning the premiere method of getting news. At one time it owned a number of newspapers and broadcast news channels, but now, under Kenneth Thompson -the son of Thomson Co.'s founder- the information conglomerate has shifted to financial services among other things. The appeal of Reuters to Thomson Co. seems obvious. Murdoch's lust for Dow Jones is similar, he seeks to gain its financial news service which completes the triad of major competitors in the financial news industry alongside Reuters and Bloomberg. But Murdoch has also eyed the Journal longingly for some time now.
It's hard to say whether the Thomson Reuters union is for the best. Reuters recently survived a disastrous period of poor investments and decline that helped open up the market for Bloomberg. Joining forces with Thomson might prove beneficial. Thomson Co.'s field is not far off from Reuters, its clients are different though. Thomson's data is usually used by institutional investors buying securities while Reuter's information is bought by brokers and sellers.
Still, many financial professionals and Wall Street employees prefer to hear from multiple news services and less competition means less sides to voice an opinion. But accuracy in financial news is probably far more financially valuable than other news fields so that may not prove problematic.
Murdoch's bid is an entirely different story. The reason there is so much opposition of acquisition by Murdoch on Dow Jones' part is because Murdoch is widely regarded as a partisan fop fumbling his ownerships and ruining world wide news (News Corp owns Fox and all its affiliates). Why should The Wall Street Journal, praised by both liberals and conservatives for being a highly objective newspaper, want to taint that record in a day and age where objectivity is such a rare sight?
Murdoch's timing demonstrates his incompetency. His bid comes not long after real estate mogul Sam Zell, who is completely inexperienced in newspaper ownership, bought Tribune Company which owns major newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and plans to increase its revenue by firing a portion of the Tribune newsroom. So when the Journal newsroom sees an probably damaging owner enter the game and then see the same thing coming their way, it's no surprise that they would resist.
In the past, newspapers and news sources were commonly owned by publishers or editors-in-chief. Today it's whoever feels like adding a newspaper to his or her collection of businesses. Hopefully Dow Jones will successfully stave off Murdoch. As for Reuters, may the best outcome occur.