One of our favorite stories about the Wall Street Journal concerns a visit to Hong Kong in the late 1970s by the two sisters who then controlled Dow Jones & Co. Inc., Jesse Cox and Jane Cook. The Journal had recently launched, in a rundown printing plant in Causeway Bay, the Asian edition of the Journal. The sisters rented a Chinese junk, with uniformed crew, and took the staff of the new edition for an evening cruise in the Fragrant Harbor. It was the first time many of the writers and editors, including a young reporter who is now the editor of the Sun, had ever gotten close to the heirs of Clarence Barron. When the sisters took chairs on the deck and invited questions, one of the reporters asked, “Mrs. Cox, what would you like to know about?” It was a moment when enormous issues of war, peace, capitalism, and communism were in the air. Replied Mrs. Cox: “Who wrote that wonderful story about the horse race in Australia?”*

Over the years, no doubt some people laughed at such a proprietorship. Others revered it. During the Bancrofts’ dispensation, Dow Jones was often listed by Fortune as among the best-managed companies in America. In our own experience we have never admired a newspaper leadership more than that of the visionary publishers during the Bancroft years, particularly Warren Phillips and Peter Kann, who, when so many were betting against America in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and Communist China, took the Journal into the fray internationally as a voice for free minds and free markets. The whole journalistic apparatus of the Wall Street Journal came to stand for quality and fairness and accuracy. In the proposition that capitalism and markets were the better bet than communism, the Journal scooped the world.

By our lights, congratulations are in order for the whole team. Their greatest achievement was to manage the hat trick of succeeding as a business enterprise while producing the highest quality journalism in newspaperdom, and while also honoring the proprietor’s belief that a great newspaper was also a public trust. In a season when the death of newspapers is being heralded everywhere, and nowhere more than in newspapers themselves, the company they built has just been sold for a radically higher multiple of earnings than the rest of the industry and something like 67% more than the market had thought it was worth.

It has done so at a time when the giants are facing headwinds. The New York Times is plagued by dwindling circulation, and the Chicago Tribune fell into internal feuding. It adds up to a context in which the sale of Dow Jones and its Wall Street Journal represents a triumph. And all the world will be watching to see whether Rupert Murdoch, one of the greatest of competitors, will find his own success with the Journal. Certainly his success is something that all Americans, even his competitors, will hope for.

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We tend to look at the newspaper war through the prism of New York, where the battle is going full tilt, with at least seven contenders in the daily fray. There’s a large broadsheet, the Times; a small one, the Sun; two tabloids, the Post and the News; and two free tabloids, AM New York and New York Metro, plus the Wall Street Journal. Each is backed by enormously wealthy and idealistic owners. Apart from all other elements of the newspaper war, there is the exhilaration in the battle of news and ideas and commerce that the contest entails. The rise of the Internet holds new and exciting opportunities, leveling the playing field and inviting first-time competitors and opening a period of Schumpeter’s creative destruction. The Bancrofts assembled one of the finest bands of newspapermen and women ever to enter the lists. The family leaves the field covered with glory, even as the battle is moving to a new phase where new victories are up for grabs by one and all.

* It was William D. Hartley, then the Journal’s roving correspondent in Singapore, whose dispatch of October 29, 1976, ran under the headline: “Annual Horse Race Will Halt All Activity In Australia for 3 Minutes on Tuesday.”