Two In One Week: Now Reuters May Be Acquired

from the on-the-wire dept

Fri, May 4th 2007 11:27am — Joseph Weisenthal

Just days after Dow Jones confirmed that it had received a takeover bid from News Corp., news service Reuters has announced that it too is the subject of a bid. The company didn't identify the suitor, but speculation is that it came from Thomson Corp., which offers financial data through its Thomson Financial division. As in the case of Dow Jones, Reuters has an arcane shareholder structure, so the bidder has offered a heavy premium in hopes of getting a deal done. While many news organizations are struggling right now, it's interesting to see these bids coming in for companies with a heavy financial bent. Financial news remains a valuable commodity, and these companies have shown a strong ability to report and package this information. Still, there's a lesson here even for the non-financial media firms, which is that companies are more likely to succeed if their content is vital for whatever base they're trying to serve.

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4 Comments

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skh.pcola, 4 May 2007 @ 12:49pm

Thomson is ginormous. Those guys have several thousands of my dollars that I've spent on textbooks. Any company in the textbook business has to be raking in the cash. Crooked bastiches.
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- Vincent Clement (profile), 4 May 2007 @ 1:14pm
  
  Re:
  Except that Thomson is in the process of selling the textbook division. The money gained from that transaction is being used to finance the takeover of Reuters.
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Devang (profile), 4 May 2007 @ 2:37pm

For a while there it seemed like media consolidation was being reversed with Tribune and some other magazine(?) companies... eh, never doubt the power of people like Murdoch.
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Ron Larson (profile), 6 May 2007 @ 3:53am

Considering how incompetent and biased Reuters proved itself to be during the 2006 Israel vs. Hezbollah conflict, I wouldn't think the Reuters would be worth 2 cents.

They were the ones that printed most of Hezbollah's fauxtography scams.
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