Murdoch's Ownership of the Wall Street Journal Shifts Focus–Is He Taking on the NY Times?

Two related stories that I found in the Romensko news-about-newspapers newsletter. First, on Journalism.org, that the WSJ is shifting a lot of its front page coverage away from finance and toward politics and international news. and second, one columnist on the Recovering Journalist blog speculates, very cogently, that Rupert Murdoch is attempting to essentially surround the New York Times with its properties, fighting from below with the New York Post, from above with the Wall Street Journal, and laterally with a possible purchase and relaunch of a metro NYC edition) of Newsday.

As a former New Yorker his growing media empire makes me nervous. I remember when the New York Post was a very decent newspaper, before he got his tabloid-sensationalist fingers into it. Of course, he doesn’t always kill a paper’s journalistic integrity; the London times still seems to be doing ok, and Murdoch has owned it since 1981. But I surely would not want to see him owning both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times–America’s only two national papers other than the USA Today.