Murdoch eyes New York Times
REUTERS:
Rupert Murdoch yearns to buy the New York Times and toyed with acquiring a sizable minority stake in Bloomberg News, Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff reports in an October 2008 article.
The News Corp chairman and chief executive has bought the Wall Street Journal and loves to gossip about news and even report stories himself, Wolff reports. He also sees his own family facing the same kind of internal division as the Bancrofts, who eventually sold him the Journal.
How could he avoid that fate, Wolff asked. "Oh, simple, I can't. All I can do is delay it," Murdoch responded.
Wolff, who is writing a biography of the Australian-born media tycoon, reports that before sewing up the deal to buy the Journal, Murdoch "for an hour or so" decided that Merrill Lynch & Co Inc, heading for financial trouble, would be ready to sell its 20 percent stake in Bloomberg, and that he would buy it.
That deal never happened, but Murdoch did buy one of the best-known newspapers in the United States and now wants another -- the New York Times. READ IT ALL
