Federated, May End Merger Talks -- WSJ
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Merger talks between Federated Department Stores Inc.  and May Department Stores Co.  broke down after the two companies could not agree on the price Federated would pay for May, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
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NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO  - Yahoo Inc is reportedly in talks with News Corp to combine their Web properties, but Wall Street analysts rained scorn on the likelihood of a deal that can fend off Microsoft Corp's $42.1 billion bid for Yahoo.
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Dow Jones & Co. Inc. and Rupert  Murdoch&#39;s News Corp. are close to a pact that would protect the  journalistic independence of The Wall Street Journal if News  Corp. acquired the media company, according to newspaper  reports on Sunday.
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Dow Jones & Co. , in talks over a takeover by News Corp. , met with supermarket magnate Ron Burkle and Internet entrepreneur Brad Greenspan on Tuesday in an effort to find an alternative offer, a source familiar with the situation said.
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Members of the Bancroft family, which controls Dow Jones & Co. Inc. , may decide by the end of the week whether to accept a $5 billion offer by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp  for the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
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DoubleClick's law firm deleted Web pages hinting at a conflict of interest with the head of the Federal Trade Commission, which is reviewing the merger. The law firm says the Web pages were "confusing."
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News Corp. will probably end subscription fees at WSJ.com and will open the MySpace social-networking website to developers in a push to add readers and advertisers, chairman Rupert Murdoch said.
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U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC)&#160;Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras won&#39;t recuse herself from considering the antitrust implications of&#160;Google&#39;s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick, despite a request from two privacy groups that she do so.Majoras, in a statement Friday, said&#160;the request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD)&#160;contains &quot;key factual errors.&quot; The two groups filed a petition Wednesday saying Majoras&#39; husband works for a law firm that is advising DoubleClick on the merger before U.S. and European regulators.The Web site for John Majoras&#39; law firm, Jones Day, at one point said it was representing DoubleClick &quot;on the international and U.S. antitrust and competition law aspects&quot; of the Google merger. But Platt Majoras said in her statement that Jones Day has never contacted the FTC about DoubleClick and that she didn&#39;t know it was representing DoubleClick in Europe until earlier this week.A second FTC commissioner whose wife also works for Jones Day also said he won&#39;t recuse himself.The EPIC and CDD petition also is incorrect when it says that John Majoras is an equity partner in Jones Day, Platt Majoras said. John Majoras switched his partnership from equity to nonequity status in January 2006, she said.&quot;I understand that as a fixed-participation partner, his compensation will not be increased or affected by changes in the firm&#8217;s income,&quot; Platt Majoras said.&quot;My husband does not represent any party in the Google-DoubleClick matter. He is in no way connected to the matter, nor are any of the parties to the matter otherwise currently his clients.&quot;EPIC and CDD, in a joint statement, said the FTC has &quot;failed utterly&quot; in its procedures to alert Platt Majoras about potential conflicts of interest. Despite Platt Majoras&#39; claims that she doesn&#39;t have a conflict, John Majoras is an antitrust expert at Jones Day, and one of his key responsibilities is business development in Washington, D.C., they said.Platt Majoras &quot;simply sets out the conclusion that the interests in her participation in this matter outweigh the potential conflict without providing any of the relevant factors that support that conclusion other than that she is the chairman of the commission,&quot; said the statement from EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg and CDD executive director Jeffrey Chester.Jones Day changed its Web site&#160;after the groups pointed out that it said the firm was representing DoubleClick on U.S. antitrust matters, wrote Rotenberg and Chester.&quot;The logical conclusion is that Jones Day ... sought to destroy the relevant evidence,&quot; Rotenberg and Chester wrote.A Jones Day spokesman didn&#39;t immediately have a comment when asked about the EPIC and CDD allegations.Google in April announced plans to acquire ad-serving giant DoubleClick in a $3.1 billion deal. That same month, EPIC, CDD and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG) filed a petition asking the FTC to block the deal unless Google made significant changes to its privacy policy. The groups argued that the combined company would have unparalleled access to Web users&#39; personal information.FTC Commissioner William Kovacic also noted, in a Friday statement, that his wife, Kathryn Fenton, is a nonequity partner at Jones Day. The EPIC and CDD petition had not sought to have Kovacic recused.The FTC&#39;s three other commissioners, Pamela Jones Harbour, Jon Leibowitz and J. Thomas Rosch, issued a joint statement, saying that they agreed with the decisions of Platt Majoras and Kovacic not to recuse themselves.&quot;It is evident that these commissioners have at all times taken affirmative steps to conduct themselves in complete conformity with the ethical standards that apply to their positions,&quot; the three said.
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(InfoWorld) - News Corp. recently discussed swapping its MySpace social-networking site in exchange for a large stake in Yahoo, according to published reports. However, the status of the discussions remains uncertain because News Corp. made the proposal before Terry Semel resigned on Monday as Yahoo's chairman and CEO, according to reports published Wednesday by The New York Times and the U.K. Times. Both newspapers attributed the information to anonymous sources. The New York Times reported that News Corp. discussed with Yahoo the idea of giving up MySpace in exchange for a 25 percent stake in the Sunnyvale, California Internet giant. Meanwhile, the U.K. Times said News Corp. told Yahoo it wanted a 30-percent stake for MySpace. With Yahoo's market capitalization at $37.7 billion mid-morning Wednesday, the deal would put MySpace's value at between $9.4 billion and $11.3 billion. News Corp. bought MySpace along with other Internet properties for $580 million when it acquired Intermix MediaInc. in July 2005. The U.K. Times, which is owned by News Corp., reported that its parent company is interested in the Yahoo stake as a way to gain "exposure to a far larger Internet-based business." The New York Times characterized News Corp.'s overture as "informal" and as a "loose proposal" that hasn't generated "meaningful negotiations." The U.K. Times called the discussions "tentative" and potentially closed now that Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang has become its CEO. Yahoo reportedlyÂ tried unsuccessfully to buyÂ social-networking site Facebook for $1 billion last year. In May of this year, the U.K.'s Sunday Telegraph reported that Yahoo had expressedÂ interest in buying social-networking site BeboÂ for the same amount. Yahoo executives have in the past year publicly acknowledged the company is weak in the social-networking space, ruled currently by MySpace. In the U.S., MySpace attracted almost 80 percent of all visits to social-networking sites in April, followed in a very distant second place by Facebook with 11.5 percent, according to Hitwise. Bebo came in third place with 1.3 percent of visits. Yahoo 360, the company's social-networking site, took seventh place with 0.71 percent. News Corp. declined to comment about Wednesday's reports. Yahoo didn't immediately respond to requests seeking comment. Â
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Business-software maker's antitrust victory may pave way for accelerated merger activity in overcrowded IT markets, experts say.
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Federated Department Stores Inc.  is in preliminary talks to buy rival May Department Stores Co. , the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
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Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (NWSa.N) is  in talks to combine MySpace and other Internet properties with  Yahoo Inc  to fend off Microsoft Corp's  $42.1  billion bid, according to several reports.
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SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- Shares of wireless carriers Nextel and Sprint rose Thursday after the Wall Street Journal reported that the companies are discussing a merger.
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(InfoWorld) - Feeling that its partnership with Yahoo Inc. yields fewer benefits than in the past, AT&T Inc. wants to trim the deal's scope and seek more favorable conditions for itself, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. Specifically, AT&T seeks a revision of how the companies share ad and Internet access revenue in their years-long agreement to sell co-branded broadband services to consumers in the U.S., the Journal reported, quoting anonymous sources. Negotiations have already begun for renewal of the pact, which ends in April 2008 and which Yahoo originally struck in 2001 with AT&T predecessor SBC Communications Inc. Back in 2001, AT&T needed Yahoo more than it does today to market its broadband services to consumers, because broadband is now in higher demand, the article states. Yahoo gets between US$200 million and $250 million in annual revenue from the partnership, and could see its bottom line affected if those payments were reduced, according to the Journal. The profit margins on these AT&T fees are generally higher than the margins Yahoo enjoys from its other operations, the paper said. More indirectly, traffic to Yahoo's Web sites and usage of its services could be affected if the pact is scaled back, the Journal said. The joint customers obtain, along with the AT&T broadband connection, a suite of Internet tools from Yahoo, including e-mail accounts, PC security software, a photo management application and exclusive videos. Industry analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group doesn't find the news surprising. "I don't think Yahoo is providing AT&T with that much value and I'm not convinced that Yahoo is getting that much value from AT&T," he said. In 2001, AT&T needed an Internet company to partner against the combination of the newly merged AOL and Time Warner Inc., but the once popular trend of selling Internet access along with online services has pretty much disappeared, Enderle said. "Now AOL is nowhere near the power it once was, and people are shopping for their Internet connection separate from their [online] services. The need to have both [tied] has gone away," he said. Meanwhile, AT&T hasn't helped Yahoo much to combat the rise of Google Inc., Enderle said. "Like anything else, partnerships are formed when there is an advantage and they tend to fall apart when that advantage goes away. Here, the market conditions that created the partnership in the first place have largely evaporated," Enderle said. Asked for comment, AT&T sent a joint statement that says the companies have "the most successful partnership in the industry" thanks in large part to the ongoing dialogue they maintain. "Though it is not appropriate to speculate on future plans, we frequently collaborate on our existing partnership to ensure that we deliver the most innovative broadband experience to our customers now and in the future," the statement reads.
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Nextel Communications and Sprint are negotiating a possible merger, according to a source familiar with the discussions. It was not clear how far the talks had progressed, and
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Sprint and Nextel, two large US mobile companies, are discussing a possible $70bn merger, according to newspaper reports.
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JPMorgan Chase  and Washington Mutual  have held "very preliminary" talks about a merger, CNBC's Charlie Gasparino said on Friday.