New York City ? Rupert Murdoch is poised to win control of Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co. after the company’s board approved his $5 billion buyout offer late Tuesday, a person familiar with the matter said.

Murdoch will be clinching one of the great trophies of U.S. journalism and a newspaper that is considered required daily reading among the business and power elite.

The deal will also expand Murdoch’s already massive global media and entertainment empire News Corp., which owns the Fox broadcast network, Fox News Channel, the Twentieth Century Fox movie and TV studio, MySpace, newspapers in Australia and the U.K., and several satellite TV broadcasters.