Number 60 State Street holds a nostalgic appeal for a certain type of Bostonian. The city’s party crowd fondly remembers when the Bay Tower Room, the building’s penthouse lounge, used to hum with cool jazz tunes as they basked in its glory as the hub for nightly revelling.

But “The Room” has been closed for four years and today the red granite skyscraper will host an altogether more sombre affair. When the scattered and squabbling members of the Bancroft family convene in the ninth-floor offices of Hemenway & Barnes, the law firm, they will only have one point on the agenda: whether to sever their 105-year association with Dow Jones and sell the media group to a rather younger listed family business – Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation – for $5bn (£2.4bn, €3.6bn).