Weakness attracts predators. It's true in the jungle of maximum-security prison, the jungle of the actual jungle, and in the most unforgiving jungle of them all: the mergers and acquisition world.
That's the truth behind the unfolding Dow Jones saga. It was the weakness of Dow Jones' performance -- compounded by its frail future in the face of the relentless consolidation of media and financial properties -- that unleashed Rupert Murdoch's long-held lust for The Wall Street Journal.
But through the self-righteous haze of whining and breast-beating, through the valedictory pronouncements about the loss of The Wall Street Journal's century-old independent media voice, I have heard nary a word about the real culprits: the Journal's leadership, and the Bancroft family themselves.
These guys were asleep at the switch, and now we're supposed to grieve because they were popping corporate Ambien? I mean, c'mon now, these are supposed to be the smartest observers of business on the planet. Shouldn't that have given them at least some very small, very tiny inkling of the profound challenges that were gusting through the competitive media and financial landscape? Shouldn't they have had a strategy for leveraging the power and trust of their brands in a world where content is the proverbial king?
But this king, like most royalty, wasn't the sharpest Ticonderoga in the battered pencil cup. Year after wasted year, Dow Jones and the leadership of the Journal were in the pole position, and they totally blew it. They couldn't have been closer to the action if they had their nose in hedge fund cocaine.
Consider that they had a clear-eyed view of where the future was going, plus tons of money to invest and a ferociously loyal family to support their vision. So why did Dow Jones allow some parvenu, history-free media company -- from Canada, no less -- to grow to the point where it could acquire Reuters, and by doing so indirectly put their beloved Journal into play, because it could no longer prosper as a stand-alone entity?
So let us weep not for the Bancroft family, who are flustered and indignant at the paper falling into Murdoch's hands - and are now engaged in the futile undertaking of trying to legislate editorial independence -- but who allowed their prize to drift sideways for so, so long while they clipped coupons in preppie lassitude. While the WSJ reporters mockingly covered 100-year companies who thought they had a legacy lock, the company itself was becoming a victim of the same complacency.
So whether Murdoch wins, or whether GE and Pearson put in a bid, or whether some strange concatenation of wealth and vanity appears -- say, Ron Burkle, Jim Cramer and Bono -- isn't the point. The point is that Dow Jones could have been a global media and financial information property, with hummingly syngeristic platforms in print, the Internet, TV and publishing. In fact, they could have, and should have, been Bloomberg. But the world they covered so intensively turned out to be the world that did them in, and for that, there is no excuse.