Natalie Bancroft named to News Corp. board

NEW YORK, Nov. 6 (UPI) -- Natalie Bancroft will serve on U.S. media giant News Corp.'s board, but family rancor led Rupert Murdoch to make the choice, a published report said Tuesday.

So intractable were the talks that the Bancroft family, which controlled Dow Jones & Co. before agreeing to sell the company to News Corp for $5 billion Aug. 1, missed an initial 30-day deadline under which it was permitted to nominate its own candidate for News Corp.'s approval, Dow Jones' Wall Street Journal reported.

The end result is that instead of a seasoned newspaper veteran some family members and many journalists had hoped for, the family's representative will be a 27-year-old opera singer living in Europe who acknowledges she is a neophyte to the worlds of journalism and commerce, the newspaper said.

"This entire, sad and pathetic, final episode is a fiasco," family member Crawford Hill said in an e-mail to his relatives. "No wonder we lost Dow Jones!!"

Bancroft must be approved by the other News Corp. directors.

A vote is unlikely before News Corp.'s takeover of Dow Jones is finalized, the Journal said.

The deal is expected to close shortly after a shareholder vote Dec. 13.

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