Rupert will get WSJ; Wall Street will get it

By Al Neuharth, USA TODAY founder

NEW YORK — Men and women who run the USA's 1,437 daily newspapers are gathering here for the annual convention of NAA (Newspaper Association of America). They expected mostly to fret about how to survive in the Internet Age.

But now all the buzz is about Rupert Murdoch's $5 billion offer this week to buy Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal. My hunch on both subjects:

*Murdoch will get Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, although he may have to sweeten his $60 a share offer by another $5 or $10 (about $500 million to a billion more).

*Wall Street finally will get it. Stock prices of publicly traded newspaper-oriented media companies will be in favor again.

I've known and admired Rupert for more than 30 years. He took a small family-owned Australian newspaper and developed it into one of the world's biggest newspaper-radio-TV-Internet organizations. He realized early on in the Internet Age that he was not just in the newspaper business — but in selling news, information, entertainment and advertising 24/7 in any way the consumer wanted.

Wall Street analysts have depressed newspaper company stocks because they don't understand that newspaper reporters are the best gatherers of news and information on earth and that their websites now give them a much bigger total audience.

The Wall Street Journal has been a pioneer in seeking ways to make that pay off. The New York Times and USA TODAY are not far behind. Smaller newspapers across the country are doing the same.

When Murdoch completes his deal for Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, the mood about newspaper-oriented media companies across the USA will shift from survive to thrive.