Covering Microsoft's Bid and Battle

By Jonathan Higuera
February 5, 2008 07:11 PM

Reporter Elise Ackerman of the San Jose Mercury News was skiing in Lake Tahoe when she heard the news. Todd Bishop, a technology reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was sleeping when he got a call at 3:30 a.m.

Both business reporters had heard murmurs that Microsoft may want to buy Yahoo, but until Microsoft’s Feb. 1 announcement that it was waging a $44.6 billion takeover bid for Yahoo, there wasn’t enough information for a full-blown story.

From Lake Tahoe, Ackerman used her database of sources to feed information to the other two reporters working on the main story back at the paper. Bishop couldn’t nail the story down for Friday’s paper, but he got the news onto his Microsoft blog by 4 a.m. 

Before the big story broke, both Bishop and Ackerman had built themselves a good foundation. They had been watching for signs that Yahoo might be in trouble. The company had a poor earnings report, a share price drop, a layoff announcement and the resignation of Terry Semel, a key board member and Yahoo’s former chairman and chief executive.

“The rumors have been out there for years,” Bishop said. “Then you start seeing actual events that tend to be precursors to something like this and you start to pay more attention.”

Now with the announcement news behind them, both Bishop and Ackerman have shifted gears to attack the story’s next phase.

Ackerman will try to determine if the proposal will stir up a serious anti-trust skirmish. She also will closely examine the specific terms of any proposal, including a possible counterproposal from Yahoo. And she will tell readers more about the individual players involved.

“We’re still getting cranked up in our coverage,” she said. “It’s very complicated what they are doing and we’re trying to see what the most realistic part is.”

Bishop will look at what the proposal means for Microsoft in the long run and how the company could change if the purchase goes through.

“Microsoft is acknowledging that for the first time in its history, it will have to go into debt to pursue this deal,” he said. “You wonder where it will take them long term…Right now we’re waiting for Yahoo to evaluate the proposal and come back with a response.”

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism