I'll make this short because for me, at least, the point seems obvious. The owner of a property gets to do whatever he or she wants to do with the property. Rupert Murdoch has forked over $5 billion to acquire Dow Jones (which includes The Wall Street Journal). This means he can do anything he pleases with it. I may not like it, you may not like it, The New York Times might really not like it… but none of us owns the property. Mr. Murdoch does.

I bring it up because in this instance, and in countless other acquisitions I've witnessed or been involved in over the years involving high technology companies, there's often this sense among the old guard that the new guard had better be careful to perserve the old traditions. It's happening in this case, too. Here, for example, is a Yahoo News Opinion piece via The Nation with a fair amount of hand wringing and a spotlight on a planned protest aimed, I think, at trying to make sure the new owner does the right thing. Or, if not the right thing exactly, at least he'll know his every move is being closely scrutinized. From all I can discern from reading about all this, Rupert Murdoch couldn't care less.

For a straight version of the actual news, here's a link to a piece by Richard Siklos of The International Herald Tribune.

Unless agreements to perserve some things are made a part of the formal contract among the buyers and sellers — and there are a couple of these stipulations it seems in this deal, mostly involving some key editors — everything else is fair game. After all, if a person or a group wants to maintain control, they should retain ownership. You can't sell something outright and still expect to exert influence over the direction of the property's future, not in America anyway and not as I understand the capitalist system. Sure, he may make changes that some see as dreadful, but he has every right to do what he wants.

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It's a beautiful, sunny, Sunday summer's morning here in New England. For years at this time many people from all over become interested in the summertime Tanglewood concert series in western Massachusetts, owned and operated by The Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). So it was only natural I would find and read this story from the Berkshire Eagle, a real newspaper with an online component, about the serious issues facing the BSO over declining ticket sales, new competition from New York City, and generational changes in people's travel and entertainment tastes. It's a very comprehensive, well-written piece by Jessica Willis of the Berkshire Eagle staff. (A local person who called this year's lineup a public relations disaster is what caught my eye first.)

But I was most impressed by the Berkshire Eagle's inclusion of a trackback in this story. A trackback lets me let them know that I've written something about what they wrote. (That's not a great sentence, I realize, but this is Sunday and it's been a long week.) In this way, Jessica Willis and others at the Berkshire Eagle can be automatically alerted to online posts with reaction — positive and negative — to anything they've published. It lets ordinary people like me who might have additional information, join the conversation. And, when that happens, readers of the Berkshire Eagle get a broader view of perspectives from people other than the journalist penning the orginal piece. In a nutshell, in my humble opinion, that's what this social media thing is all about.

So here's your chance. Do you have a point of view about how or why the BSO should find a way back to the days when Janis Joplin rocked the concert series? If you have a blog of your own, you can link to Ms. Willis' piece, read it, write your own post, insert the trackback offered by the Berkshire Eagle, and her readers will be your readers too if they elect to read your perspective.

It's just that simple. It's just that powerful.

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