Bidding war for Dow Jones predicted

NEW YORK – Shareholders in Dow Jones & Co. have said they expect a bidding war to erupt in the wake of Rupert Murdoch’s $5 billion takeover bid, according to Bloomberg News.
Murdoch’s News Corp. yesterday offered $60 per share for the 125-year-old company, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and the Dow Jones Newswires. The bid represents a 65-percent premium above the previous day’s closing price.
But the bid was rejected by the Bancroft family, which owns about 25 percent of the company and controls about 64 percent of votes via ownership of Class A and Class B shares. The Bancrofts have controlled Dow Jones since 1902.
“We’re in the first inning,” Lawrence J. Haverty Jr., associate portfolio manager at Gamco Investors Inc. in Rye, N.Y., which owns about 825,000 Dow Jones shares, told Bloomberg. Haverty predicted possible bids from rival publishers Washington Post Co., Gannett Co. and even Google Inc., saying: “Dow Jones is a fish in the pond and there are sharks swimming around.”