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The battle is over, Rupert Murdoch has won.  Not only has Mr Murdoch won, he has also done it with little effort.  His efforts to buy the revered American financial newspaper, the Wall Street Journal have ended with a family realizing its destiny and mismanagement of its own firm.  As Louis Ureneck was quoted in yesterday’s Financial Times, “The irony of The Wall Street Journal is that it’s such a great journalistic institution and yet it’s been so poorly managed.  The double irony is that it’s a newspaper about business.”

Now I must admit that I am biased, as I read the Financial Times on a daily basis, and find the conservative leanings of the WSJ editorial board too much for my tastes.  However, I can only see two logically possible outcomes from the $5 billion takeover of Dow Jones by News Corporation:

The first outcome would be that Mr Murdoch ignores the agreement with Dow Jones’ Bancroft family and injects his meddlesome influence beyond into just operations but into the editorial content as well.  As anyone who knows media has already written, Mr Murdoch is known for his conservative touch on all his media outlets, from Sky Television to Fox News.  His tabloid sensationalism and penchant for selling product often comes with an ideological slant.  Were this to be the case, Mr Murdoch could alienate a large portion of his financial readers and convert them to subscribing to rival newspapers such as the global leader, Financial Times.

This gives me reason to believe that the second possible outcome would be more likely:  Rupert Murdoch would rather enhance his competitive stance and win people into switching to his paper.  By tampering with the current format, Mr Murdoch has nothing to gain from purchasing the Journal, particularly at the 65% price premium offered.  It is true that buying the newspaper will serve News Corporation’s agenda in promoting a Fox financial channel to rival CNBC.  But if Mr Murdoch doesn’t stay on the mark, the newspaper’s reputation gets cut on the spot.  Though my ideologies differ from Mr Murdoch, I recognize that changing the format makes little business sense.  If you buy a broken valuable and it ain’t fixed, don’t keep breaking it.

Ultimately, businesspeople are looking for accurate, balanced, and in-depth information.  Afterall, the markets depend entirely on information.  By skewing the news agenda and information of the Wall Street Journal and by creating a sense of distrust amongst its readers, Rupert Murdoch will lose out.  Smart business dictates Murdoch won’t choose to lose out.