In 1902, Boston boardinghouse owner Jessie Barron bought Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Wall Street Journal, with a down payment of $2,500. She did this at the behest of her longtime boarder and not-so-longtime second husband, financial writer Clarence Barron. But Mrs. Barron really was the owner, and when she died in 1918, her majority share passed to her daughter by her first marriage, Jane Bancroft.



The Bancrofts have held a controlling stake in Dow Jones ever since. Jane's husband Hugh Bancroft was company president for a time, but since his death in 1933, the family has mostly kept its hands off. "I want you to do what's best for the company," Jane reportedly told her husband's successor, reporter turned manager Casey Hogate. "Don't you and the boys worry about dividends." The modern, globe-spanning Journal was thus built by "the boys" from the newsroom while the Bancrofts stood benignly by (though they did, as the Journal returned to health after the Depression, eventually start caring about dividends).



Now, as you have surely heard, the three dozen cousins who have a hand in voting the shares inherited from Jessie Barron face a momentous decision. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. has offered to buy them out at a staggeringly high price--$60 a share, or 75% higher than the market was valuing Dow Jones before the offer. The Bancrofts' initial answer was no, but there is disagreement within the family. If Murdoch ups his bid, anything could happen--and the current betting on Wall Street is that something will.



With that, yet another leading family would depart an American news business once dominated by such clans. Newspaper-owning families began selling out in a big way to corporate chains in the 1960s. The largest chains--Gannett, Knight-Ridder, Tribune, Times Mirror--mostly started out family run as well, but as they expanded, the family stake was diluted, and Wall Street came to call the shots. This wasn't all bad; lots of family-owned newspapers were horrible. Knight-Ridder in particular gained a reputation for improving the properties it bought. But with profits under severe pressure from the Internet, Wall Street has turned the screws. Knight-Ridder was sold off and busted up last year; Tribune, which bought Times Mirror in 2000, was acquired by vulture investor Sam Zell in April.



Left standing are the great exceptions to the eat-or-be-eaten model, the family-owned companies behind the country's three best newspapers: the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. The Bancrofts were unique in their disengagement from the business they controlled. But their view of the company they inherited as a trust whose value exceeded the dividends it generated was shared by the more hands-on Sulzbergers of New York City and Grahams of Washington. "It's not just family ownership," says Alex Jones, director of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and co-author of two histories of newspaper families (the Sulzbergers as well as the Binghams of Louisville, Ky.). "It's a particular kind of family ownership that's nearly miraculous."



That kind of near miraculous commitment can be awfully hard to maintain. In recent decades, all three families have made use of dual-class stock structures that allow them to take Wall Street's money while attempting to resist its pressures. At the New York Times Co., the Sulzbergers own 19% of the company but control 70% of the voting power. At the Washington Post Co., the Grahams own close to 40% of the company and get about 75% of the votes. At Dow Jones, the Bancrofts own 25% of the company and get 64% of the votes.



The Grahams have so far escaped much criticism because their company has performed well (mainly thanks to its Kaplan educational subsidiary), but the New York Times Co.'s outside shareholders have been clamoring for an end to the dual-share setup. Still, they don't have the votes to force a change. The biggest danger to family control inevitably comes from the family members themselves.



That's the case at Dow Jones. A decade ago, two of the younger Bancroft cousins began agitating for more shareholder-friendly management. They've gotten their way, to an extent. For the first time since Hugh Bancroft, the company has a CEO who didn't rise through the reporting and editing ranks. But the stock continued to flounder until Murdoch came along with his hugely attractive offer.



It is a lot to ask of a bunch of far-flung cousins to run the business they own as a public trust. Lately there has been much talk of restructuring news organizations as actual trusts--that is, nonprofits. Florida's St. Petersburg Times is the biggest American paper that works this way; overseas the Guardian in England and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany are foundation owned. Creating these entities, though, requires a far greater sacrifice than any made so far by the Bancrofts, Grahams and Sulzbergers: they would have to hand over their shares without recompense.



Which leaves Murdoch. As he emphasized in a letter to the Bancrofts, his company is a family enterprise too . He inherited Australia's Adelaide News from his father in 1952, and his children will get his stake in News Corp. It's yet another dual-share setup, with the Murdochs holding (after a share swap currently awaiting regulatory approval) 13% of company stock and 39% of the votes.



That is no majority--one key difference between the Murdochs and the Bancrofts. A bigger difference is that Murdoch has treated News Corp. not as a trust but as a vehicle to get richer and more powerful. From one newspaper in a provincial Australian city, he has built a global empire that now encompasses 20th Century Fox, MySpace and the Times of London. The man has shown a remarkable ability to sniff opportunity where others don't. But he is 76, he won't be around forever, and it's hard to say what News Corp. will be in the absence of his controversial genius. Quite possibly, it will be yet another family media business that stops being a family business.

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