All Intensive Purposes

We know enough about capitalism to know that there is no separating ownership and control.

The Wall St. Journal's editors.

[T]he "two-class" shareholding structure that undergirds America's three best newspapers (the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal) was explicitly designed to permit decisions to be made for non-economic reasons. If you want management to concentrate strictly on raising the share price, you don't need any special ownership structure. Financial markets will insist on that anyway. The only justification for "Class B" shares giving special voting power to the Sulzberger family at the Times, the Graham family at the Post, and the Bancroft family at the Journal is the assumption that the families will weigh other factors in deciding how the news operation should be run.

James Fallows. Fallows' post is excellent, if now moot -- read it all anyway.