This may be good news...Internet tycoon offers new plan for Dow Jones to foil Murdoch

[babsbunny]

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Internet_tycoon_offers_new_plan_for_07202007.html

An Internet entrepreneur who last month bid for a stake in Dow Jones Co. on Friday made a new offer aimed at helping controlling family shareholders find an alternative to an offer from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

The latest announcement from Brad Greenspan, the founder of the MySpace social network website, came after Dow Jones' board members accepted Murdoch's five-billion-dollar bid that was to be debated by the Bancroft family, which controls a majority voting stake.

Greenspan's revised offer calls for his investment group to provide a loan of between 400 million and 600 million dollars to Bancroft family members "to buy out liquidity-seeking family members" at 60 dollars per share -- matching the Murdoch offer.

[Unreconstructed Lib]

1. Even without knowing anything about Mr. Greenspan, I tend to think that it has to be a better deal.

Just keeping any entity with such a huge potential to propagandize Americans and control their resources out of Murdoch's paws has to be a good thing, right?

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

2. Well, keeping Murdoch's unprincipled hands off an established American enterprise would be a

good idea.

:toast: MKJ

[babylonsister]

3. OK, now I need someone to explain this to me. But it sounds like at

least there's an option.

[spooky3]

6. I think it means

Some of the family members would like to sell their stock so they would get the cash that they want for other things.
The family members who don't want to sell to Murdoch can't afford on their own to buy the stock of the other family members who want to sell, at the price Murdoch is offering.
Greenspan is offering to loan the money to the family members who don't want to sell to Murdoch to buy out the family members who want to sell.
This would mean the family could still own the WSJ, though they would owe a lot of money to Greenspan.
Later, if they couldn't repay the debt to Greenspan, it might mean they would lose the company to him, or may be forced later to sell to someone else (maybe Murdoch) to get the $ to repay Greenspan.

[babylonsister]

10. Thank you, spooky3. You did clarify for me. nt

[BrklynLiberal]

4. hmmm. I thought I heard that Murdoch owned myspace

I hope I am mis-remembering.

EDIT: Nope I was right.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4697671.stm
On 19 July, what appears to be the first really substantive part of the new strategy swung into action: the purchase, for $580m, of the firm behind the wildly popular Myspace.com online community.

http://gigaom.com/2005/08/06/why-murdoch-bought-myspace/
Why Murdoch Really Bought MySpace?

[spooky3]

7. interesting. It sounds as if Greenspan's investment group

got at least some of its money to make the WSJ loan offer by selling MySpace to Murdoch!

Or maybe Greenspan sold it previously to someone else, who is now selling it to Murdoch.

[FogerRox]

5. Could this be good ? Who is this Brad guy? Myspace? and what else....

Is he a lib ?

He seems to have a grudge against Rupert:

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Brad+Greenspan&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

[cascadiance]

11. I don't know, but there's also a deal that's trying to be worked out between Yahoo and Newscorp...

regarding Myspace that has been owned by Newscorp.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article1957867.ece

Perhaps he's still pissed off at Newscorp for what they might have done with Myspace. I've seen personally old owners of companies that were bought out not to happy with the buying companies afterwards and wanting to find ways to get back at that company.

Seems like we need to sort this all out...

I currently work for Yahoo, and haven't relished the idea of Newscorp getting any kind of stake at Yahoo. I'd like to think that we'd turn a little more to "the left" with Terry Semmel leaving. I wonder how all of these "deals" would work together.

[babylonsister]

8. A bit of history on Greenspan; has anyone heard of eUniverse?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace

The MySpace service was founded in August 2003<8> as a new initiative and 100% owned division of publicly traded internet company eUniverse (which later in mid-2004 changed its name to Intermix). eUniverse created and marketed the Myspace website, providing the division with a complete infrastructure of finance, human resources, technical expertise, bandwidth, and server capacity right out of the gate so the MySpace team wasn’t distracted with typical start-up issues. The project was overseen by Brad Greenspan (eUniverse's Founder, Chairman, CEO), who managed Chris DeWolfe (MySpace's current CEO), Josh Berman, Tom Anderson (MySpace's current president), and a team of programmers and resources provided by eUniverse.

[Jillian]

9. Oh boy do I hope so.

Anyone has got to be better than Murdoch having his dirty, little hands in the stock market.