General Electric will decide within days whether to team up with Pearson to counter News Corp’s $5bn (£2.5bn) bid for Dow Jones, the owner of the Wall Street Journal.

One of the options under discussion between GE, which owns the CNBC business television channel, and Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, is a joint venture that could include Dow Jones’s controlling Bancroft family as minority partners, people familiar with the situation said.