War at the Wall Street Journal Read Online Free PDF Page B

the seemingly impenetrable wall that surrounded Dow Jones.
    Jimmy continued to press Zannino about the best way to approach the company. Zannino knew enough of the directors to provide some insight into the dynamics on the board.
    Jimmy started a new page on his notepad.
    Jimmy had to understand, Zannino explained, the family thinks they are protecting the
Journal
by keeping Dow Jones independent. Despite the failing stock price, some in the family thought selling a single share in the company was an act of disloyalty. "That's what they believe and that's what Peter believes," he said. They would sell only if they could have some kind of assurance that the company would remain at least partly independent.
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FAMILY WANTS ASSURANCE—COMPANY STAYS INDEPENDENT.
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    "It's like somebody making an offer for your store; you still want to be able to manage it," Zannino offered. "They care about the independence of the
Journal
."
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OFFER FOR YOUR STORE—INDEPENDENCE OF THE JOURNAL
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    Jimmy understood all that, and it sounded like the typical noises of a family business before it sold. The Bancrofts, he perceived, all wanted assurances and to be dragged across the finish line. What he needed to know was how to make the approach.
    "Who else is on the board?" Jimmy wanted to know. "Who might 'get it'?"
    Zannino mentioned four board members. Three of them had been nominated in 1997 to bring some outside voices to an insular board: former American Express chief Harvey Golub, former Bankers Trust chairman Frank Newman, and former Pfizer CEO Bill Steere. Former Hallmark CEO Irv Hockaday was a long-serving board member and the company's lead director. Of those four, Harvey, Irv, and Frank were the closest to Peter Kann.
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HARVEY NEWMAN HOCKADAY STEERE
OF THEM, HARVEY, IRV & FRANK
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    After the two hung up, Jimmy filed his notes away in a thin red folder marked " DOW JONES ." He called Rupert Murdoch to update him on the conversation. He told Murdoch, again, that Zannino understood the company's strategic dilemma. There were many hurdles yet to clear, but Jimmy sensed, as he put down the phone that day, this time it really could happen.
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    Peter Kann's love of journalism began early. At age nine, he started publishing the "Jefferson Road Snooper" (with the help of his mother) in his leafy Princeton, New Jersey, neighborhood. In high school, he worked for his local paper, the
Princeton Packet,
owned by Barney Kilgore, who transformed the
Journal
from a narrow investment daily to the nation's business paper. At Harvard, Kann reported for the
Crimson.
After college, he was hired by the
Journal
as a reporter in the Pittsburgh bureau in 1964.
    Glynn Mapes, who started at the
Journal
a year before Peter Kann, remembered the young reporter: "He was a really nice guy who didn't give a damn about business stories. The word was he never wrote one, and he never wore a wristwatch. He also rarely had a word changed by any of his editors." From San Francisco, Kann quickly moved to Los Angeles and then abroad to Asia, where, at twenty-four, he became the paper's first resident reporter in Vietnam. (One of his stories told of a nine-nostriled water snake that South Vietnamese villagers feared more than the Vietcong.) By the early seventies, when he won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the 1971 India-Pakistan war, Kann had become something of a romantic figure. For ten years he lived in an antique-filled apartment halfway up Victoria Peak in Hong Kong. He owned a motorized junk and hosted what became legendary poker games.
    Kann's worried mother, if she hadn't heard from him for several weeks, would call the paper's Page One editor, Michael Gartner (later of NBC News), to check on her son's whereabouts. The first time she contacted him, Gartner heard her heavy Austrian accent—she and her husband were refugees of Jewish descent who arrived in the United States during World War II—and answered her question truthfully: he