I wrote a story in today’s New York Times about how Dow Jones has lost its spot in the Standard & Poor’s 500, getting replaced by GameStop, a shopping mall seller of new and used video games.
For Dow Jones, the demotion is but one more sign of the painful move into Rupert Murdoch’s fold. For devotees of Dow Jones, it’s bad enough that a king of the tabloids now takes ownership of the Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones is an iconic company, whose very name is synonymous with Wall Street. Yet because it now is no longer a publicly traded company, but instead merely a division of the conglomerate News Corp., Dow Jones has lost its spot on the stock market’s most influential index.
About Dan Fost
Dan Fost is a freelance writer in the San Francisco Bay Area whose credits include Forbes, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today and San Francisco magazine. He specializes in technology, but branches out into baseball and other features. Dan’s book, “Giants Past and Present,” about the baseball team, was published by MVP Books in Spring 2010. As a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle for nine years, he had a front row seat at the rise and fall of the dotcoms, as well as their resurrection in the form of Web 2.0. In a lengthy career in newspapers, he has covered sports, social ventures, the environment, education, police, business, and politics. He is a native of New Jersey and a graduate of Boston University. He lives in Marin County, Calif., with his wife and son.
Just last week, I was in the middle of writing an email pitch to a reporter at Dow Jones (who, because I have at least a modicum of discretion, will remain nameless) when word of News Corp.’s acquisition of Dow Jones flashed along the CNN scroll in my hotel room. The breaking story all but ruined my pitch, but I thought more about how it affected the aforementioned scribe. I feel for those folks, I really do.
Congratulations on the New York Times article Dan. Great stuff.