• CNNMoney, Thursday, January 12, 2006 12:01 PM

Fortune senior writer Devin Leonard here explains how, after years of dissatisfaction with financial results at Dow Jones, the company's controlling family, the Bancrofts, were persuaded that this was the time to make changes in top leadership.  Unfortunately, says Leonard, Dow's Wall Street Journal failed to tell the tale.  "When the whistle blew and the shit hit the fan, we got all the branches of the family together and said, 'Something has to be done,’” James Lowell, the Bancrofts' onetime investment advisor, told Leonard.  Richard Zannino, Dow's newly installed CEO, is said to recognize the challenges faced by the company--weak prior management, plus a difficult environment for print papers in general--but he is committed to advancing the company's content initiatives on multiple platforms, thus spreading out the investment risk.  According to the Fortune story, Zannino is optimistic about MarketWatch, the financial Web site, but is "a little more cautious" about the Journal's weekend edition.

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