Wall Street Journal shareholders approve Murdoch bid

New owner plans changes to the Journal’s Web site and online operations.

NEW YORK (AP) — Rupert Murdoch’s $5 billion-plus bid for Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, cleared its final hurdle Thursday as shareholders of the financial publishing company gave their approval, setting up the deal to close later in the day.

The changeover is sure to bring significant changes to the Journal, starting with a new management team that was announced late last week. Longtime News Corp. publishing executive Les Hinton will be chief executive, while Robert Thomson, editor of Murdoch’s The Times newspaper in London, will be publisher. Several Dow Jones executives are departing, including CEO Richard Zannino.

Shareholders approved the deal by a margin of 60.3 percent. About 78 percent of the company’s publicly traded shares were voted for the deal, while 54 percent of the Class B shares, which are largely held by the Bancrofts, were in favor.

Later Thursday, Murdoch, Hinton and Thomson addressed several hundred Wall Street Journal reporters in the paper’s main newsroom. Murdoch, holding a microphone and standing on top of several boxes of copier paper, told the assembled crowd that he had high hopes for the paper’s future.

“I know that change is often difficult or creates nervousness,” Murdoch said, according to a transcript of his remarks provided by News Corp. “If it’s particularly nervousness then certainly let us know. We’re very accessible people.”

“Our aim is pretty simple,” Murdoch said. “We have to entertain, inform, enrich all our readers in their lives and in their businesses. We must be the pre-eminent source of financial information and comment in the world.”

Despite a general malaise affecting many U.S. newspapers, Murdoch has said he sees major potential in Dow Jones with the booming demand worldwide for business news and information. He also intends to beef up the paper’s online operations and Washington coverage, and is contemplating changes to the Journal’s Web site to further open it up to nonpaying subscribers.

The deal places Dow Jones, which had been family-controlled for more than a century, into the fold of Murdoch’s global media conglomerate News Corp., which owns the Fox broadcast network, Twentieth Century Fox, Fox News Channel, satellite TV businesses in Europe and Asia, MySpace, as well as a large group of newspapers in Australia, the United Kingdom and the New York Post.

The controlling shareholders of Dow Jones, the far-flung Bancroft family, had initially rebuffed Murdoch’s approach this spring, but eventually Murdoch was able to win over enough of them to assure the deal would be approved.

Murdoch’s price of $60 a share represented an extremely rich premium of 65 percent over the value of Dow Jones shares immediately before the bid became public. Other than Dow Jones, the shares of many other newspaper publishers have declined sharply this year on concerns about the companies losing more advertising dollars to the Internet.

Murdoch won his campaign to acquire the company in early August after months of wrangling with the Bancroft family, who had controlled the storied publishing company for more than a century. The Bancrofts’ roughly three dozen adult members are descended from the family of an early owner of Dow Jones, Clarence Barron.