A robber baron in Barron's house
IN JULY 1907, Clarence Barron stopped by the offices of Dow Jones & Company to join more than 100 people anxiously awaiting the announcement of a dividend from the Southern Pacific Company. Before the news broke, Barron's employees surprised him with a Gorham silver loving cup, to honor both the 20th anniversary of his founding of the Boston News Bureau, which led to his 1902 purchase of Dow Jones, and his status as the company's conscience.
Now, 100 years later, a different type of media mogul is seeking control over the house that Barron built, one who shares Barron's appreciation of profits but by all indications respects few of his guiding principles. As Barron's descendants, members of the Bancroft family, consider Rupert Murdoch's $5 billion offer to buy Dow Jones, including The Wall Street Journal, they would do well to remember "The Commodore," as the yacht-loving Barron was known.
Barron was born in 1855 in Boston, in a vine-covered stone house he recalled in his unfinished memoir as filled with cats and ruled by his teamster father, "Honest Henry Barron." Before he turned 15, Barron resolved to become a newspaperman, finding a temporary job with the Boston Daily News, then moving to the more elite Evening Transcript, where he soon created the paper's first financial news department.
In 1887, he struck out on his own, having concluded that bankers, brokers, and business leaders craved accurate, honest news more often than the twice-a-day dispatches provided by the morning and evening papers. He launched the Boston News Bureau, offering multiple daily updates for the princely sum of $1 a day. At first he was a one-man show, racing around the State Street financial district for news and then handing off the rough-hewn bulletins to a pair of delivery boys.
Soon the enterprise flourished, built on Barron's belief that readers were best served by truth, delivered quickly and without varnish. "The soul of all writing, and that which makes its force, use, and beauty, is the animation of the writer to serve the reader," Barron said around the time he began being known as the "Father of Financial Journalism." It's hard to imagine such a phrase being spoken by Murdoch, who built a fortune on journalism that polemicizes issues, settles scores, and seeks or revises downward the lowest common denominator.
Barron brought his vision to New York by buying Dow Jones and the Journal. "In the gathering of news he was utterly indifferent to the criticisms of others, and for that reason no one was big enough to snub him," said William Hamilton, who served as the Journal's editor under Barron.
On the wall of his office he posted his credo, which read in part: "I have striven for a creation so founded in principles that it can live as a service -- live so long as it abides by the laws of that service. . . . The Wall Street Journal must stand for the best that is in Wall Street and reflect that which is best in United States finance. Its motto is, 'The Truth in its proper use.' " Contrast that with Murdoch's Fox News and New York Post, where fairness has somehow become a word drenched in irony.
It's worth noting that even as Barron drove himself and his employees, he never fired or laid off a single one. As the Journal's vice president and general manager Kenneth Hogate wrote in 1928: "Nothing brought Mr. Barron more joy than the developing personnel in his various organizations. The spiritual and material welfare of his 'boys' was ever on his mind."
Contrast that with the fears of the Journal's current union, which predicted that a Murdoch takeover would mean "gutting the enterprise and slashing the staff that make it the leading financial news organization."
These days, Murdoch is sometimes called "the world's most powerful media executive." In that sense, if few others, he fits one Barron dictum that should guide his heirs in the weeks to come: "If you must pick a fight, pick only worthy adversaries."
Mitchell Zuckoff is a professor of journalism at Boston University and author of "Ponzi's Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend." 
