Pearson (PSO) To Bid For Dow Jones (DJ)?

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

As 24/7 Wall St. wrote on May 19, Pearson (PSO) is attempting to put together a bid to buy Dow Jones (DJ). Hearst, which co-publishes SmartMoney with Dow Jones, and GE (GE) which has a partnership through its CNBC website, have been approached to join the group making the bid.

Pearson is already in closely related businesses. It owns the Financial Times, FT.com, and 50% of the global magazine, The Economist. The company, which was founded in 1844, has many of the same principles as Dow Jones on matters of editorial independence. A bid from the company would be viewed as preferable to selling the company to Rupert Murdoch.

Pearson is much larger that Dow Jones. Last year, it had revenue of $8.1 billion and operating income of $1.1 billion. Its market cap is over $14 billion compared to Dow Jones at $5 billion.

A combination of the two companies could involve substantial editorial and distribution savings.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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