Business.com put up for sale

As the Journal points out, the pair of entrepreneurs who spent $7.5m in 1999 to get the domain name were mocked at the time but now companies such as Dow Jones could be interested in buying.

Unfortunately for the Journal's reporter, Dow Jones declined to comment. That's particularly hard to take when you consider that the Journal's reporter works for… Dow Jones. So, to summarise: Dow Jones reports that Dow Jones might buy a company but Dow Jones can not possibly comment. Still, covering the Business.com story must be easier for Journal reporters than covering the story of News Corp. buying Dow Jones. Such are the complexities of the modern media.

These tricky positions are nothing new, of course. In the 1990s, Ziff-Davis was acquired by Softbank, making the publisher of PC Magazine, PC Week et al bedfellows with companies such as Yahoo, E*Trade and several others that Japan's Softbank had a stake in, as well as the Comdex trade show franchise.

Yesterday, what is now Ziff Davis Media agreed to sell off its Enterprise Group, including Eweek, Baseline and Microsoft Watch to private equity for $150m in cash. µ