Paper Chase.(The Talk of the Town)(Dow Jones; Rupert Murdoch)

In the ninth-floor conference room at the Wall Street Journal, outside the office of the managing editor, Paul Steiger, there is a framed T-shirt that reads "WWBD"--or What Would Barney Do? It refers to Byron (Barney) Calame, now the outgoing public editor of the Times, and formerly a deputy managing editor who oversaw standards at the Journal. A plaque hangs below the shirt, featuring a mission statement, "My Guiding Principles as a Newspaper Man," written by Calame in the nineteen-fifties, when he was a teen-ager and living in Missouri, the son of a minister. The shrine serves as a reminder, in these bloggy, profit-slender days, of the paper's stolid roots.

Last Tuesday, when the news broke that Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corp., had made an offer to buy Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company, for five billion dollars, those roots were shaken, and not for the first time: in the fall had come the introduction of a fashion desk ("preposterous!" one reporter called it), then the elimination of all Canadian bureaus; now the "fair and balanced" juggernaut loomed. Work stopped as employees gathered around TVs. Dow Jones stock soared, and staff cynics, who have been resigned to the eventual sale of the family-run paper ever since the demise of Telerate, a Bloomberg-machine competitor, asked one another, "Can I exercise my options?"

A number of reporters who are active with the paper's primary union began e-mailing about a course of action. "I think we need to put together a letter," one wrote. "If we're convinced it's a bad thing," another added. "Dude, it's Murdoch," the initiator replied. "I'm not sure there's anything worse," a third respondent chimed in. Soon after, the union released a statement: "The staff, from top to bottom, opposes a Rupert Murdoch takeover. . . . Mr. Murdoch has shown a willingness to crush quality and independence, and there is no reason to think he would handle Dow Jones or the Journal any differently."

Paul Steiger, meanwhile, sent a memo to staffers expressing gratification at the size of the offer ("a testament to the high quality and integrity of your work"), and advising the rank and file to "avoid getting caught up in what ifs." Journal employees name-checked Marshall McLuhan and compared notes on Murdoch's decimation of the Times of London, in the early nineteen-eighties, and his reputation for leaking stories to the Post's reporters. But the Journal, as one former staffer put it, "can be a craven newsroom, and the people there have a beaten-down mentality." Nobody threw a water cooler.

"This is a classic family story," one longtime reporter said on Wednesday, giving voice to a narrative that had taken hold as events unfolded, with members of the Bancroft clan, which controls Dow Jones, rejecting the initial offer, and Murdoch proposing a ...