Dirty Digger: charm offensive or just plain offensive?

The Bancroft family, who sold out Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, comes off as "dysfunctional as the Windors", writes Andrew Clark in the Guardian. Christopher Bancroft, the seller, is shown left.
Clark recounts a family farce almost as bad as Queen Elizabeth's annus horribilis, where one bitter relative shows up at the corporate meeting wearing a fishing cap emblazoned "Bite me."

The tycoon's brilliant business strategy just took a bit of time

"like a parent waiting for a baby to cry itself to sleep, Murdoch simply waited for the Bancrofts to exhaust themselves with in-fighting."

Big Deal Done?

Well, tycoon Rupert Murdoch has apparently clinched the deal with Dow Jones. If so, his empire no longer has horizons as we know them. Does Rupert Murdoch own your media outlet yet? But Dow Jones denies that it's a done deal, $5 billion or not.

But even a go-ahead, blue sky thinking, mega-tycoon occasionally has second-thought, according to Seth Sutel of the Associated Press:

Yet even as technological innovation mints new winners, not all of them manage to stay on top. To get a sense of just how quickly the game of king-of-the-hill goes in technology these days, consider a telling remark that Rupert Murdoch, arguably the most powerful media kingpin alive today, made just last month.

Murdoch pulled off what many consider a master stroke two years ago by acquiring the online social hangout site MySpace for what turned out to be a bargain price of $580 million. Now, just two years later, Murdoch appears to be having second thoughts about holding on to MySpace, which had been considered the cat's meow of social networking.

Reports have circulated that he'd like to swap MySpace for an ownership stake in Yahoo, and in early June he lamented to an interviewer from The Wall Street Journal that online users weren't necessarily abandoning newspapers for MySpace.

"I wish they were," Murdoch said. "They're all going to Facebook at the moment."