Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal is being sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News International.

Dow Jones is reported to have agreed a $5 billion. Negotiations have been completed and the board is confident the terms of the deal will be accepted by the Bancroft family, which controls a majority of voting shares in Dow Jones, over the next few days. A formal announcement is expected next week.

The Business Online exclusively reports :

Murdoch’s News Corporation will take over America’s most prestigious financial publisher at the price he originally offered on April 17, when he proposed $60 a share when the stock was trading at $36, a 67% premium … The arrangement is a tougher version of the one put in place by the British government when Murdoch bought The Times and The Sunday Times in 1981. Murdoch will have less control over the independent directors at the Journal than he does at Times Newspapers, where they are regarded as weak and ineffectual. But one source, acting for the Bancrofts, admitted privately that the Dow independent panel was only a “fig leaf” to facilitate the sale and that over time Murdoch would get round it.

Stay tuned for more news from the billabong.

Update: Wired is reporting a refutation of this story : “An article published on Thebusinessonline.com this morning stating that an agreement in principle has been reached for the sale of Dow Jones & Company to News Corp is incorrect.”

Heads up Robert Scoble.

Slightly off-topic, but still in the arena of stock markets, we can report that the doughty Dow Jones industrial index of shares on Wall Street is an astonishing 110 years old.

That’s a very good age for a quasi-scientific metric of share values. Created by Charles Dow, editor of The Wall Street Journal, it started with just 12 constituent companies, and even now has only 30.

Changes to the Dow are rare and at the whim of individual editors conscious of the tradition. They don’t deal much with market capitalizations or alternative measures considered objective by rival operators. It’s unscientific and market professionals mostly use the S&P 500. As the Times comments: “… for many it remains the unquestioned barometer of US capitalism.”

We wish them every success for the next 110 years.