Sell the presses!

Fears and tears at 200 Liberty Street as Rupert Murdoch inches ever closer to landing his white whale--The Wall Street Journal. The Rambler knows a little about newspapers--just enough to be dangerous. There is worry that Rupert will dumb down the paper, shorten its famous page one stories and otherwise cheapen the brand.

All of this is likely but it has also been going on there for quite awhile anyway. The paper has already been shrunk and the stories with it. And truthfully, some of those stories should be shorter. The paper will probably be able to prosper a little more as part of a larger media conglomerate. Of course, the reason for that is that current management and the family that has supported this management have missed numerous opportunities to build their own empire. Oh well, what's done is done.

What's being lost in all the hand-wringing about what Rupert owning the WSJ will mean for the paper is the more fundamental question of how much media one company should own. For all the talk about the Internet knocking down walls and creating new voices, truth of the matter is that the bulk of media is controlled by a dozen companies. If News Corp. gets the WSJ, it will own that, Fox News, the Fox Broadcasting Co., several other powerful entertainment and sports cable channels, local TV stations reaching almost half the country, MySpace and last but not least The New York Post. (We won't even go into his holdings outside the U.S.)

Now it's not for me to say whether this is too much or not but it is food for thought. Then again if the private equity firm Blackstone can gobble up anything and everything in sight, sell a stake to China and no one says boo then...anyway, wiser minds can argue this point.

One of the more amusing side stories to all this is the surprise among WSJers. Reporters are cynical by nature but sometimes incredibly naive when it comes to what's going on under their noses. They toil away writing stories about takeovers, layoffs, and all the other joys of business journalism with a jaded eye and then when it is their own company they are shocked, shocked, to find that there is gambling going on.

Your winnings sir.