When Rupert Murdoch stunned the Bancroft family with a $5.6bn bid for Dow Jones in 2007, the quintessential newspaper man was transfixed by their empire’s flagship publication, the Wall Street Journal, and paid little attention to other assets.

A consensus took hold among staff and analysts that divisions such as the Factiva news database or the indexes operation that put Dow Jones’ name into every market report could be sold off to offset some of the rich bid premium.