UPDATE 1-Dow Jones does not need higher Murdoch bid-Ottaway
(Adds second shareholder lawsuit in fourth paragraph from bottom)
NEW PALTZ, New York, May 24 (Reuters) - More than 200 e-mail messages awaited Jim Ottaway last weekend. Instead, he spent some time reading the Odyssey -- in ancient Greek.
Ottaway, who controls more than 6 percent of Dow Jones & Co. Inc.'s DJ.N voting shares, has been in high demand after he publicly rejected Rupert Murdoch's $5 billion bid for the company in the pages of its flagship, The Wall Street Journal.
Journalism purists cheered and the financial community reacted with slack-jawed surprise at the notion that anyone would refuse that kind of money. At $60 per share, Murdoch's offer represented a stratospheric 65 percent premium to Dow Jones' stock price when the bid was disclosed late last month.
"We're not trying to get another $2 a share. We don't want to sell to Murdoch for $75 a share," Ottaway, 69, told Reuters over lunch at a Greek-run diner in New Paltz, a small college town 85 miles from New York City in the Hudson River valley.
"It's the principle, not the price .... It's the person, not the price," he said in an interview earlier this week.
Ottaway, who has been part of Dow Jones since his family sold their local daily and weekly newspapers to the company in 1970, is not concerned that its stock price is almost certain to erase recent gains if Murdoch's bid fails.
"I don't get any great pain if they lose money because they thought Murdoch was going to win," he said as he picked at a slice of chocolate cake and nursed a cup of coffee. "They're not long-term investors interested in independence and the slow, steady growth of Dow Jones."
Like many members of another family, the Bancrofts who primarily control Dow Jones, Ottaway thinks selling to Murdoch would hurt The Wall Street Journal's editorial integrity.
His complaints about the Australian media mogul include a perception that Murdoch's newspapers have been soft in their treatment of China's government due to his business interests in the country and that news coverage in his publications, including the New York Post, show political bias.
A News Corp. spokesman was unavailable for comment, but the company has said in published reports that Ottaway's concerns reflect "tired cliches." Murdoch has also said News Corp. would safeguard editorial integrity of Dow Jones publications.
FROM TROY TO THE DIXIE CHICKS
Ottaway left Dow Jones as senior vice president in 2003 and quit the board in 2006, but remains influential as he and his immediate family control 6.2 percent of its Class B stock, which give them more power than ordinary Class A shareholders.
At first glance, he appears an unlikely adversary to the globe-trotting Murdoch, 76. Ottaway is slender, bespectacled and wears his salt-and-pepper hair a little on the long side.
He looks more like a rumpled professor than a veteran publisher and lives in New Paltz, where the coffee shop tip jar has a sign reading "Impeach Bush" and the scent of incense spills out of the New Age bookstore on to a sleepy street. Continued...
