The Bancroft family has accepted what was inevitable for the past three months and agreed to the sale of Dow Jones, which includes the Wall Street Journal, to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

The controlling family was split from the moment the offer was made and the pressure was on those who did not want to sell from many of the non-voting shareholders. The Dow Jones statement confirming the agreement says that a Bancroft or someone nominated by them ill get a seat on the News Corporation board.

The statement says: "…the parties have agreed on the terms of an editorial agreement that provides for the establishment of a five-member, special committee with the objective of assuring the continued journalistic and editorial integrity and independence of Dow Jones’ publications and services. The initial members of the special committee will be Louis Boccardi, Thomas Bray, Jennifer Dunn, Jack Fuller and Nicholas Negroponte."

Do I remember something similar when Murdoch acquired The Times in London?

But the question now is what does this all mean for the future of financial news? The new Fox business channel and development of the WSJ looks like a challenge to Pearson and the Financial Times.

Financial news and information is certainly going to get more competitive. Thomson (the company that sold The Times to Murdoch) has acquired Reuters for $17 billion — three times more than News Corp has paid for Dow Jones. That may be where the biggest battle will be. 

 Rupert Murdoch’s chances of gaining control of Dow Jones, publishers of the Wall Street Journal, are looking much better after the Bancroft family which controls 64% of the voting shares said they would talk to News Corporation.

In a statement, the family said it would meet Murdoch  "to determine whether, in the context of the current or any modified News Corp. proposal, it will be possible to ensure the level of commitment to editorial independence, integrity and journalistic freedom that is the hallmark of Dow Jones".

The Wall Street Journal itself reported: "Dow Jones & Co.’s 125-year history as an independent media company could be nearing an end."

Lost Remote says it is "a surprising new development". The only reason it is "surprising" is that so much of the comment and reporting has been based on wishful thinking and dislike of Murdoch and his way of running newspapers. That seems to have blinded people to the realities of Murdoch’s well-pitched $5 billion offer.  

The signs that it could succeed have been there from the beginning. My reaction in Wordblog on May 2 was:

With the controlling Bancroft family divided he stands a good chance of succeeding. The family said yesterday that it intended to cast “slighly more than 50%” of the voting stock against the $60 a share offer for Dow Jones, publisher of the financial paper. According to the WSJ that suggests about 80% of the family voting power is against a deal.

The family control depends on super-voting “B” shares with carry 10 times the voting power of “A” shares in Dow Jones. Yesterday two-thirds of the “A” shares changed hands as the price shot up by more than a half to $56.20, many of them going into the hands of investors who are likely to press for the sale.

With the family now also indicating it would consider other offers, we are likely to see some hard bargaining to increase the Murdoch offer.

Roy Greenslade has picked up on Telegraph editor Will Lewis’s opening address at the 6th International Newsroom Summit and thinks it implies that the Telegraph group is going to follow other mainstream publishers into battle against Google.

According to ifra, Lewis called on newspapers to welcome transformation as a friend. The traditional business model would be replaced and he warned news organisations making the digital transition must both invest in training and be alert to attempts to cannibalise their material. He continued:

Our ability to protect that content is under consistent attack from those such as Google and Yahoo, who wish to access it for free. These companies are seeking to build a business model on the back of our own investment without recognition; all media companies need to be on guard for this. Success in the digital age, as we have seen in our own company, is going to require massive investment; [we need] effective legal protection for our content in such a way that allows us to invest for the future.

It would seem to be an obvious step for publishers to follow those who have reached agreements with the secretive Google company. It is difficult to build a picture of what is happening but Lewis’s speech follows one earlier this month by Samuel Zell, new owner of the huge Tribune group in the US .

In a speech (Washington Post) at Stanford Law School he said newspapers could not economically sustain the practice of allowing their articles, photos and other content to be used free by other Internet news aggregators.

He asked the question: “If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?” and provided his own answer: “Not very.”

Associated Press has an agreement with Google and a copyright case brought by Agence France-Presse was settled recently. In Belgium cases have either resulted in settlement or a finding against Google.

As Greenslade points out these are piecemeal agreements and, “Globally, publishers and news agencies need to get together to reach a sensible, comprehensive, macro agreement with Google and Yahoo.”

It will certainly be a big fight. As Business Week pointed out recently: “Google is ground zero in a battle among traditional media and tech industry leaders and startups alike for the hearts and minds of the world’s consumers—or at least their eyeballs and wallets. ”
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Adam Tinworth looks at a shelf of magazines published by his employer and wonders if the “slow death of the published magazine at the hands of the internet might not be a good thing, at least in terms of the environment.”

His thought was prompted by a report that deforestation is responsible for more global warming than air travel. But then he wonders if all the energy needed to sustain online communication could be more damaging than print publishing.

Good question. What is the carbon footprint of the internet?

Later: Martin Stabe has also posted on this. He has some interesting information on the printing industry and gives the carbon emissions for one copy of the Daily Mirror as 174g of CO₂.

It often seems that history began some time in the early 1990s. While the internet has given us unprecedented free access to information, it is not good for the facts and opinion that give us the longer perspective.

From the desktop, the 1980s seems like the dark ages. So it is disturbing that libraries are under threat from cost-cutting. The Guardian reports today that the British Library, the greatest of the British deposit libraries, is threatened by government imposed cuts which could lead to charges.

The county and city libraries have long suffered from financial cuts and the need to make themselves “popular” as well as a lack of investment in storage. The result is that they throw out old books.

This is akin to bulldozing castles and ancient houses: it diminishes our ability to understand the past and how it affects the present.

I don’t think it is complete tosh. In his post yesterday on the death of Press Gazette Neil McIntosh seems to be pointing to a way of resurrecting of at least the spirit of journalism’s trade mag as a web publication.

Now, why would McIntosh who is the Guardian Unlimited’s head of editorial development suggest anything like that. Well, Roy Greenslade, who has reported the slow death of PG better than anyone, in his Guardian media blog, yesterday wrote: “It offered the kind of competition that kept us rival journalists on our toes. We could measure our success against it.”

The fact is that we need a continuance of the Press Gazette or something to replace it. Hold the Front Page is jointly owned by the giant regional press owners and Media Guardian is produced by a big media business and, as Greenslade pointed out, it needs someone to keep it on its toes.

McIntosh, in his Complete Tosh blog, says, “the magazine’s website (110,000 uniques a month) was much more popular than the printed version where, I suspect, all the effort went (4,639 sales).”

He writes: “It seems like the PG always had an internet-style problem, even before the web existed. Readers - journalists - were used to getting it for free, as it turned up in newsrooms on a Thursday or Friday, and would then be passed around. Why pay when you could get it for nothing? Sound a familiar problem?”

And finally he points at a way that a future journalism publications could succeed. “At a time when online publishing has found a very low-cost, high impact model of publication, PG went old school and bulked up. Had it embraced the new model - looking to Nick Denton [Gawker], Rafat Ali [Paid Content] or Ashley Norris [Shiny Media] rather than to the glory days of print - it might have survived.”

If there was any possibility of that model being successful if it had been done some time ago, its prospects must be much better now. A start-up online publishing business would be unencumbered by the working practices, investment and debts of the past.

It would probably have to find a new name unless the receiver finds he can only give away the Press Gazette title. But there is a real opening here for an independent British journalism online magazine and it is important that we have this voice.

The idea that the Press Gazette should be owned by a trust along the lines of the Scott Trust that runs the Guardian is attractive. It is important to the industry that there should be independent reporting and scrutiny in a time of rapid change, but it will not be easy to realise the dream outlined by the editor, Ian Reeves, today.

As he points out there have been seven different owners in recent years. The present owners Matthew Freud and Piers Morgan stepped in after the failure of the cross-subsidy stream from the British Press Awards. Their lack of success in restoring co-existence, if not love, between national newspaper editors and getting them all back into the awards is a reason given for the decision to sell.

Under their ownership both the paper and its website have improved. The Student Journalism awards, sponsored by Camelot, which are valuable in the development of young journalists have also been strengthened with Reuters hosting this year’s ceremony.

An inside page story gives more details of Reeves’ plan for “ownership by the industry” which suggest the paper can become profitable in the third year. This depends on increased display and recruitment advertising for which trustees would be offered a discounted rate. They would also get cut-price entry for the awards as part of the scheme to solve the impasse over the awards. No doubt, more details will be given at a meeting with 40 industry chief executives this week.

The success of the Guardian under the Scott Trust has also depended upon astute management of cross subsidy. The trust’s 2005-06 results show that the national newspapers made a loss of £19.3m before exceptional items. Trader Media was the “main engine of the business” producing an operating profit of £119.5m.

When the Press Gazette was founded some 40 years ago it rapidly became the first stop for recruitment ads. Ironically, the Scott Trust-owned Guardian now has that position.

Reeves says the aim would be “to publish Press Gazette as a profitable enterprise while ensuring its editorial independence”. He says: “The proposal requires a modest seed funding from each of the founding trustees, but also outlines the benefits that they would see from their involvement.”

It is right that the Press Gazette should be saved, yet I fear it is going to take more than a promise from the chief execs to put in a little money (seed funding and advertising) and buy expensive tables at the annual awards. But it should not be beyond 40 of the industry’s top executives to find a solution.

The German media giant Bertelsmann is to invest $63 million in getting new digital media projects on their feet. They have established a new venture capital fund, says Innovations in Newspapers. The plan is to take minority stakes in young digital media companies.

Some rather surprising statistics suggest that the regional press is increasing its readership. Hold the Front Page reports that 400,000 new readers have been added according to the 2006 edition of Target Group Index, an annual market research survey published by the British Market Research Bureau.

The number of people who read a regional newspaper but not a national has, it is reported, grown by 2.8% in the last year to 27%. Regional newspapers are now read by 83% of the UK population, it says.

I have not yet been able to lay my hands on a copy of the research, or a press release. When I do it will be interesting to look at how the research was carried out. At the moment, I am finding it difficult to equate these results with declining circulations.

DVDs are one way of boosting newspaper circulations but bribing people is another. This afternoon I went to a railway station news-stand to buy a bottle of Coke and handed it to the sales assistant to scan. “Can I scan this paper ?” she asked, picking up a copy of the Sun. “You get the Coke half-price and you don’t have to take the paper.”

Could this be same Sun as the one David Rowan was writing about in the Standard in June 2002? On the subject of
circulation tricks he wrote:

The Daily Mirror proclaimed in April that it was abandoning bulk sales in favour of “more effective” forms of marketing. The argument makes sense to News International, which sees such giveaways as commercially pointless, especially for tabloids (The Times, by contrast, still gives away 49,000 of its 659,000 UK and Ireland copies). “There are ‘genuine bulk sales’, such as on airlines, where people sit down and read you, but dumping 300 copies unopened in a Little Chef is not legitimate, and it costs an arm and a leg,” says a senior source in Wapping. Two years ago, he says, the Mirror was posting 69,000 bulks, and The Sun fewer than 3,000. Last month, The Sun was down to 223.

This May’s ABC figures show 416,900 of the the Sun’s 3,149,029 circulation classified as “lesser rate”.