Should Yahoo buy Dow Jones?

Barry Ritholtz has surpassed himself today:

Yahoo! could match Murdoch's $5B offer, and essentially be a white night to BOTH family shareholder groups. They should be acceptable to the Bancrofts, who have been rather equivocal in responding to Murdoch's offer, as well as the the Ottaway family...
All things considered, a combination of Yahoo!/DJ makes much more sense than either a NEWS CORP/DJ or even the recently rumored MICROSOFT/YHOO!

It's not going to happen, of course. Yahoo wants to be a high-growth company, and high-growth companies don't buy negative-growth companies. And it's far from clear how Yahoo could pay for the acquisition. If it paid in stock, then the Bancrofts and Ottaways would simply be trading one underperforming stock for another.

On the other hand, if it did happen, that would be kinda fabulous. Yahoo is one of the few companies which could really revolutionize news on the internet, by making all of the WSJ's content and archives freely accessible to all. Overnight, wsj.com would overtake nytimes.com as a default website for people to link to, and its traffic would skyrocket. Somehow I doubt that Rupert Murdoch, bold as he is, is that bold.

Interestingly, Yahoo stock has given up only about half of the gains it made on Friday morning, when the rumors of a Microsoft acquisition hit the market. Clearly there's hope yet for some kind of deal.