By: E&P Staff The News Corp. purchase of Dow Jones, including the Wall Street Journal, became official on Thursday with the shareholders' vote, and today the Rupert Murdoch-led company celebrated in a two-page spread in a key rival, The New York Times.
The ad is a kind of timeline under the heading, "Defying conventional wisdom for six decades." The copy starts, "Time and again, they said it couldn't be done. Time and again, we did it....If we'd listened to conventional wisdom and hadn't stirred things up, we wouldn't be where we are today...."
The timeline opens in 1954 as Murdoch "rescues" an afternoon daily in Adelaide, Australia. It quotes without attribution the comment, theoretically at that time, "He'll be broke in a year." In fact, for the nearly two dozen landmarks, the quotes are not attributed, but that's not the point.
It then traces Murdoch's purchase of other papers and TV stations in Australia, with similar naysaying proven wrong, leading to the takeover of the New York Post in 1976 -- the comment in that case simply reprints the classic hed, "Headless body in topless bar."
From there comes the purchase of a movie studio and launching the FOX TV network ("Nobody can bust the big three") and so on, right through MySpace and then the crowning late-2007 critique, "The Wall Street Journal will never be the same," with this cheeky retort: "And that's a promise."
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