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No Firm Evidence on How Murdoch Would Run Journal
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Still, Faison said he and his colleagues did not soften their coverage and did not receive any more suggestions to do so.
"We are extremely proud of our journalistic tradition, a tradition that has kept governments, business and community leaders accountable for more than 50 years now," Butcher wrote. "But we're not squeamish about the fact that our newspapers are also vibrant businesses -- if they can't succeed as businesses, how can we maintain journalistic staff and pay levels?"
Murdoch can be unpredictable and audacious, such as in his bid for Dow Jones, and can throw even his editors into chaos when he senses a business opportunity and decides to act on it.
For example, the Australia Institute research group has criticized Chris Mitchell -- editor of News Corp.'s national daily, the Australian -- as a "climate-change denialist" for his paper's coverage of the environment. But on May 9, Murdoch launched a surprise initiative in his global media empire to make the company "carbon-neutral" by 2010. That threw the Australian "into a state of frantic confusion," Clive Hamilton, the institute's executive director, wrote in an e-mail. The paper's climate coverage has not changed, he said.
Raymond Snoddy, a media commentator who spent eight years at the Times of London and 19 years as a media reporter at the Financial Times, said News Corp. is eliminating as many as 100 journalists' jobs through buyouts and layoffs at the Times, Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World. He said part of the savings is being used to finance new color printing presses worth about $1.4 billion.
"What people don't give him enough credit for is that he's still prepared to invest in newspapers," Snoddy said. "Show me someone else who is spending that much."
Jordan reported from London. Staff writer Kevin Sullivan in London contributed to this report.
