Who says macho M&A deal-making is the preserve of fee-hungry investment bankers, holed up in the City and on Wall Street?
The newsroom of the Wall Street Journal has become a veritable corporate finance lab, churning out fresh bids for its parent company, Dow Jones, on a near daily-basis — be these putative, abortive or plain pie in the sky.
And it’s not as though the Journal’s tireless pursuit of the facts is just a self-serving quest for a soft white-knight, likely to feather their collective journalistic bed.
Indeed, Monday saw a WSJ report that General Electric and Microsoft recently discussed a joint offer for Dow Jones before abandoning the idea.
That’s GE as in the one of the crunchiest, performance-driven conglomerates to ever grace the corporate stage. And that’s Microsoft, as in the Beast of Redmond.
Still, as the Journal notes, while the talks may have broken down, there was certainly some synergistic underpinning to this idea. GE owns NBC Universal, with its financial television service CNBC, and moving on Dow Jones would disrupt News Corporation’s own plans to develop a strong financial broadcasting franchise.
The Journal goes on to speculate that GE might try and find an alternative bidding partner, having got nowhere with Microsoft. However:
“The possibilities are theoretically broad, but with no interested parties surfacing, the prospects for finding such a partner get slimmer by the day. NBC could try, for instance, to strike a deal with another internet publishing concern or perhaps an old-line publisher. But such three-party arrangements are bulky and hard to manage. And GE and Microsoft have the advantage of a long working relationship, given their history in the MSNBC cable news network.”
This follows news last week (again, chased down by WSJ reporters) that Philadelphia Inquirer owner Brian Tierney would consider an offer if a formal auction for Dow Jones developed. That followed earlier news of a union-sponsored bid involving supermarket magnate Ron Burkle.
The Journal has so far published about 50 articles relating to Murdoch’s attempted takeover, along with charts, graphics, a photo slideshow and numerous source documents. It has also published an exhaustive investigation of Murdoch’s history of “a hand on the news.”
But, on Monday, the Journal declared: “The breakdown of the NBC-Microsoft talks is a further sign that the options for Dow Jones may be narrowing.”
Clearly, this M&A business is trickier than it looks.