NEW YORK -- The Bancroft family has taken a fair share of criticism from the financial community and press since Rupert Murdoch's $5 billion surprise buyout offer for Dow Jones & Co. put them under a microscope.

The family that controls 64 percent of Dow Jones's voting stock has been knocked around for being too diverse and too far removed from the business; for lacking leadership and fresh ideas; and for picking managers who for years dropped the ball on important strategic moves.

But few could find fault Friday with the Bancrofts' decision to reverse course and consider the bid by Murdoch's News Corp. or anyone else interested in buying a company they have controlled for more than a century.

The reversal, which helped push Dow Jones' stock up 15 percent to a six-year high, may herald a wake-up call for other newspaper families, like the Sulzbergers of the New York Times Co. or the Grahams of the Washington Post Co..

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"If you're the Sulzbergers or Grahams and even though you're involved in the management of the paper, this is a big warning sign for you," said Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell Inc., a market research company for the publishing industry.

"They will be saying to themselves, 'Do we need to go find a White Knight out there that will give us the capital to make it through? Let's not wait for someone to come for us."'

Concerns about a takeover of Dow Jones have centered on whether Murdoch would threaten the journalistic independence and quality of the Wall Street Journal, its flagship paper. Assurances by Murdoch that he won't interfere with the paper have done little to assuage such worries.

But the financial problems facing newspapers owners are immediate, outsized, and may trump theoretical questions about journalistic integrity.

"This is a deal that I don't feel happy about for journalistic reasons," said Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics & Public Policy at Harvard University.

"But I feel that it would be supremely arrogant to think that in their situation I might not do the same thing," he added. "I think they are making an economic decision and I don't think you can blame anybody for that."

The heart of the problem is that readers and advertisers are moving away from print and toward digital media, meaning newspapers are suffering from a severe slump in advertising and circulation. That is unlikely to change, experts say.

There are, moreover, only so many options available to improve finances, most of which involve cost-cutting, like reducing staff levels or production costs.

"Those are minor efficiencies compared to the major changes going on in the advertising market," said Outsell's Doctor. "There is no overhaul that will work for companies that are dependent on print at this point."

He added of the Bancroft family: "They are probably feeling trapped. They simply looked to the future and they don't think they have what it takes."

Murdoch, an Australian-born press baron who publishes the New York Post and British newspaper the Times, will face the same problems with the newspaper business as the current management at Dow Jones.

But the Wall Street Journal would serve his attempts to promote and feed the Fox News Business Channel, and he may have more success than current management in building the newspaper's presence in Asia and Europe, analysts said.

As for the Bancrofts, the family's reversal would seem to suggest members found no alternative for the company in discussions over the past month — and may signal they see better uses for their money.

"That story's been told over and over again among newspaper families," said Philip Meyer, professor at the University of North Carolina and author of "The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age."

"There are too many family members for them all to take a part in managing it, so the only satisfaction they get out of ownership is money, and there are better ways to get money from their investment than running a paper," he said.

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