Now It Can Be Told: The Story of Rupert Murdoch's 'Wall Street Journal'

It's been two years since Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought Dow Jones, which includes the Wall Street Journal and other properties, from the Bancroft family for $5 billion. While the deal was watched obsessively at the time (cf., Michael Wolff's The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdcoh), there are still some twists and turns in the story that haven't been revealed.

Until now.

GQ.com has posted an oral history of the sale and its aftermath compiled by Nate Penn headlined "The Day the Journal Died," and for media observers and anyone who's interested in the direction of America's largest circulation paper, it's a must read.

Some highlights: "There was collective mass confusion. Everybody in the family was in a panic, giving their opinion, venting their anxieties 24 hours a day," said Hugh Bancroft III, a member of the family that owned Dow Jones since the turn of the century. "They were especially concerned about losing their identity, because they're losing their raison d'etre, the thing that's been in the family for a hundred years. There were a lot of people who told us that we were betraying the company. It'll be a few years before everybody gets over it." (Bancroft comes across as similarly blunt and businesslike in emails among his family reproduced on the Journal's own website in the wake of the sale.)

A reporter who goes by the name 'Anonymous #1' said, "Somewhere around 11 in the morning we get this email saying please gather on the ninth floor in 15 minutes. The whole newsroom filled up there. And as he began to walk in, I remember somebody says, 'Wouldn't it be great if we all started humming "The Emperor's Theme" from Star Wars? If we could get everybody to do it, it would be really funny, but if not it would just be three of us fired.' We did not do that."

Ryan Chittum, a former WSJ reporter turned blogger for the Columbia Journalism Review, recalled his first exposure to his new (soon-to-be former) boss as he addressed the newsroom atop a bunch of boxes of printer paper. "You've seen this guy caricatured—like the James Bond villain, the global media titan trying to take over the world. But here he is, flesh and blood, and he just looked sort of pathetic. I don't think I'd known that he'd been dyeing his hair, but it was this really sort of awful orangey-red thing, and people said that [his wife] Wendi must have been on his case or something."

Anonymous #1 also took in the scene and thought, "It was ridiculous. The man just paid however many billions of dollars for the company, and we can't get him a podium?"