I blogged about a month ago about Rupert Murdoch and the offer his News Corp made to buy the Down Jones. There’s a new development in this story that involves another bid, and two others who originally had shown interest in helping the Dow Jones AVOID being purchased by New Corp.

a committee of Dow Jones directors met with supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle and Web entrepreneur Brad Greenspan earlier today to apparently discuss possible deals. It seems that the two billionares could possibly be working on a mutual bid, in which they both would put their money together in hopes of outbidding Murdoch’s offer of $5 billion dollars.  A $5 billion dollar bid is not something that is generally beaten easily.

Greenspan was an original investor in MySpace, which ironically is now owned by News Corp. He has already offered to purchase half of the Dow Jones at the same price Rupert Murdoch has offered at $6 per share. One drawback with News Corp taking over the Dow Jones is that the Dow Jones represents a great deal of financial and news journals. They pride themselves with their independent journalistic standards, free from biased opinions that stock and business news magazines are often times associated with. If News Corp were to take over the Dow Jones, the whole structure could change. It seems that the current Down Jones owners could consider selling, but, only if deals can be set up in advance to protect the magazines it runs.

If they truly do want to sell, then it’s going to be hard to convince them otherwise. Even with people putting their money together to collectively buy enough to make everybody happy, it will do no good if a 100% sale is being sought. In that case, the only way for the Dow Jones to stay out of Murdoch’s hands is for enough people to pool their money and outbid him. Dow Jones president Steve Yount has already said that he doubts anyone will be able to match Murdoch’s $5 billion dollar bid. He also said that a partial sale to Rupert or others had not been ruled out yet.

Source: Yahoo Finance