War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire

Product Description
This is a tale about big business, an imploding dynasty, a mogul at war, and a deal that sums up an era of change. The main character, rocked by feuding factions and those who would remake it, is the Wall Street Journal, which affects the thoughts, votes, and stocks of two million readers daily. Sarah Ellison, while at the Journal, won praise for covering the $5 billion acquisition that transformed the pride of Dow Jones and the estimable but eccentric Bancroft family into the jewel of Rupert Murdoch's kingdom. Here she expands her work, using her knowledge of the paper and its people to go deep inside the landmark transaction, as no outsider has or can, and also far beyond it, into the rocky transition when Murdoch's crew tussled with old Journal hands and geared up for battle with the New York Times. With access to all the players, Ellison moves from newsrooms (where editors duel) to estates (where the Bancrofts go at it like the Ewings). She shows Murdoch, finally, for who he is--maneuvering, firing, undoing all that the Bancrofts had protected.

Here is a superlative account of a deal with reverberations beyond the news, told with the storytelling savvy that transforms big stories into timeless chronicles of American life and power.


Amazon Exclusive: William D. Cohan Reviews War at the Wall Street Journal

William D. Cohan is an online columnist for the New York Times, appears on NPR, CNN, Bloomberg TV, CNBC, and is a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair, Fortune, the Washington Post, ArtNews, The Financial Times, and the Daily Beast. Cohan is the bestselling author of The Last Tycoons and House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street . Read his guest review of War at the Wall Street Journal:

In War at The Wall Street Journal, Sarah Ellison, formerly a media reporter at the old Journal--the one we all knew and loved--has written a gripping narrative account of what happened to that gem of American Journalism and why the controlling Bancroft family agreed in 2007 to sell the paper to Rupert Murdoch, the Darth Vader of Journalism. She should know: She was part of the team that covered the story when she was at the Journal, which she has since left.

Ellison's story focuses on three sets of protagonists--none of them particularly admirable--who fought over and ultimately carved up the carcass of the Dow Jones Company, the Journal's parent company. First, are the highly dysfunctional and completely unappealing members of the extended Bancroft family--and their equally unappealing attorneys--that for years fought among themselves and seemed content to allow Dow Jones to be mismanaged and to fall into disarray. Second is the management team--led by Peter Kann and his ambitious, insensitive wife, Karen Elliott House--that allowed the Journal's financial performance to deteriorate year after year, while doing an admirable job keeping the journalistic standards high and the product enviable. Only Kann's successor as CEO, Rich Zannino, seemed to have the slightest clue that his job was to create shareholder value. Finally, comes Murdoch himself, who stopped at nothing to get his long-sought prize--including agreeing to an oversight board for the Journal he quickly ignored--and paying the whopping sum of $5.6 billion to get it (including the assumption of $600 million of debt on Dow Jones' books.)

Ellison's book does a fine job of revealing the subtext for Murdoch's unbridled ambition to get control of The Wall Street Journal: He wants to use the paper to take down, if he can, The New York Times and the Sulzberger family that owns it. He seems to have a special antipathy for Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the company's Chairman and the paper's publisher. In that regard, the fact that the entire newspaper industry is on its back and may never recover its former financial glory appears to have given Murdoch his opening. In pursuit of the Times and its national audience, Murdoch has made the new Wall Street Journal unrecognizable and its daily product undistinguished. He also has announced that he has hired a newsroom full of reporters in New York City to start covering local news stories in order to compete directly with the Times on its home turf. Curiously, Murdoch and his hand-picked management team are so delighted by their new toy, they have become blinded by what has been lost--editorially speaking--at the paper. "We produced a better paper," Ellison quotes Murdoch saying at the end of her book. "It's as simple as that."

By then, though, the reader knows Murdoch's statement is patently untrue and just more of his bullying bluster. But two other ironies have also been revealed: One, that given the ongoing distress in the journalism industry, the reporters at the paper are just happy to have jobs that continue to pay them to do--in some form anyway--what they love. And, second, that the big winners in the saga are the bumbling Bancrofts, who walked off with Murdoch's $5 billion and have scattered to the winds. A little more than a year after he bought Dow Jones, News Corp. took a $2.8 billion write-off, effectively conceding that Murdoch had paid twice as much as the company turned out to be worth.

(Photo © Frank E. Schramm III)

A Q&A with Sarah Ellison, Author of War at The Wall Street Journal

Q: How did this book come about?

A: I was covering the media at the Wall Street Journal when Rupert Murdoch made his bid for the paper. The story became an epic saga, clearly great material for a book.

Q: What was it like writing about your former employer?

A: My ten years at the Journal gave me a unique perspective on this story. I knew the institution and its people so well. I hope it made my portrait of the paper more vivid. In some ways the transition from being an employee to an outsider writing about the company was made easier by the time I spent reporting on the story while still at the paper. That was challenging; once I took leave and started writing the book, the lines were more demarcated. At that point I was just doing what I had learned to do during my years as a reporter.

Q: Why did Murdoch want to buy the WSJ?

A: He loves newspapers. He covets the influence and power that come with owning the Journal. It is the most powerful business paper in the most powerful city in the most powerful country in the world. He wants to knock the New York Times off its perch as the paper that influences the cultural and political conversation in this country. The Journal is his weapon for doing that.

Q: How has the paper changed?

A: Murdoch has turned it into a news-driven general-interest newspaper and moved it away from being a business franchise.

An interesting contrast is that the Journal used to actively avoid salacious general-interest news. In 1993, the Journal famously didn't report on Lorena and John Bobbitt for a month and a half, even as the news blanketed the pages of other papers. Then, finally, the paper broke its silence with a long profile of the urologist who operated on John Bobbitt. That was the only mention of the Bobbitts in the Journal that year. Under Murdoch, the paper would have covered that story every step of the way, like everybody else.

And it ran huge photos of Tiger Woods on the front page numerous times since his marital scandal broke, something that would have been impossible at the Journal under the previous owners.

Q: Is the paper better or worse than it used to be?

A: I think it's lost something that made it unique. Reporters at the paper now write stories that are much more similar to what journalists at a lot of other papers are writing. But Murdoch is committed to the paper, and the Bancrofts, in the latter years of their ownership, were not. So the Journal's survival is more secure under Murdoch than it was under the Bancrofts.

Interestingly, as good a businessman as Murdoch is supposed to be, the Journal is losing more money under him than it was previously. He's willing to sustain great losses for a paper he loves, which is good for the paper's staff but bad for News Corp.'s shareholders.

Q: Why is this important?

A: The Journal is the highest-circulation newspaper in the country and affects the way people think about everything from whom they'll vote for to what stocks they'll buy to whether or not they'll support a political candidate.

Q: How is the New York Times reacting?

A: The New York Times is exceedingly anxious about Murdoch's presence at the Journal. After he took over, they set up a war room of sorts to deal with his threats. Both the Journal and the Times are running the equivalent of attack ads directed at the other. (In one particularly bizarre twist, the Journal recently featured a photo of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. in an article about effeminate-looking men.) In the first scene of my book, Murdoch tells Sulzberger, "Let the battle begin!" Three years later, the gloves are off.

Q: Who is winning the biggest newspaper war in generations?

A: We don't know yet. The battle has just started. Murdoch has politicized the Journal. It could end up that conservatives read the Journal and liberals read the Times, which is fitting in the highly polarized political climate of today. It seems we can't even share a paper.

(Photo © Greg Martin)