Even as Rupert Murdoch uses FBN, his latest News Corp. project, to take on the existing business television establishment in the form of CNBC and Bloomberg, he and his top lieutenants appear to have one eye on the coming struggle with a more iconic foe. To Mr. Murdoch, The New York Times represents exhibit A in his case that the mainstream—that is, the non-Murdoch-owned—media ignores a certain viewpoint: namely, that particular blend of conservative populism, tabloid exuberance and capitalist cheerleading with which he has rewritten the rules of the news business. Now Mr. Murdoch, 76, is gearing up to use The Wall Street Journal to further that viewpoint—and in the process, knock The Times off its pedestal.

“My worry about The New York Times is that it’s got the only position as a national elitist general interest paper,” Mr. Murdoch told Time magazine in June. “So the network news picks its cues from The Times. And local papers do, too. It has a huge influence. And we’d love to challenge that.”

It’s becoming clear, then, that Mr. Murdoch plans to give The Times its first taste of real competition since the New York Herald Tribune folded in 1966, by going after The Times’ status as the national paper of record. But what’s not clear is whether The Times accepts that the gantlet has been thrown down.

Since Mr. Murdoch and his band of pirates began rattling their sabers this summer, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger has maintained a dignified silence—and he declined The Observer’s request to comment on the coming showdown. But Bill Keller, the paper’s executive editor, questioned the viability of Mr. Murdoch’s plan to build an alternative national paper. “Good journalism for an intelligent general audience is hard,” he told The Observer in an e-mail. “And we’re really good at it. Taking on The Times is not as easy as waving a credit card and proclaiming yourself ‘fair and balanced.’”

Ever since his bid to buy Dow Jones was announced on May 1, media hand-wringers have spilled plenty of ink on the subject of what Mr. Murdoch would do with The Journal. And in recent months, a picture—albeit still fuzzy and indistinct—has begun to emerge.

In early August, just days after bickering Bancrofts accepted News Corp.’s $5 billion offer, Marcus Brauchli, The Journal’s managing editor since May, held a conference call with reporters and editors from the newspaper’s various bureaus. Journal staffers from several cities—including Chicago, Boston, Atlanta and San Francisco—were involved, according to a source on the line. On that call, Mr. Brauchli for the first time relayed to the bureau staffers Mr. Murdoch’s intention to chip away at The Times’ newspaper-of-record mantle, by offering more general news. In the long-term, Mr. Brauchli told his team, The Journal hoped to reorganize its resources so that, for instance, when a bridge collapses in Minnesota, it could quickly be on the scene, just as The Times is.

But making that happen will be far from easy. “My feeling always was that the paper is best off defining itself as a business newspaper, albeit with often much broader coverage than strictly business,” said Peter Kann, who spent four decades at Dow Jones, most recently as chairman and CEO. “Where you cross the line to become a more general interest paper, I don’t know.”

In interviews over the summer, Mr. Murdoch also suggested that several other less far-reaching changes could be in the works: He noted, among other things, that more resources might be funneled into covering politics, both in Washington and internationally, and that he’d give serious thought to eliminating the online pay wall and replacing it with a model based on ad revenue.

There’s already evidence that some of these moves could soon become reality. As The Observer reported last month, Mr. Brauchli recently announced that John Bussey, known as an experienced, take-charge editor, would be the new Washington bureau chief. And, sources say, he’ll likely assign the well-regarded Gary Putka, who had been a top candidate for the bureau chief job, to oversee some coverage of homeland security and national affairs from Boston. “There’s an assumption that there will be more resources going into Washington,” Gerald Seib, who was recently named the paper’s executive Washington editor, told The Observer.

Perhaps more portentously, on Oct. 16—four weeks after The Times ended TimesSelect, which had put its columnists off-limits to readers who weren’t paid subscribers—The Journal experimented by taking down its own more comprehensive online pay wall for a day, increasing speculation that it could come down permanently in the not-too-distant future.

Industry analysts say such a move would be one of the most threatening actions The Journal could take with regard to its new rival. “If Murdoch takes down the pay wall, the competition for the business reader will increase,” said Ken Doctor, a media analyst with Outsell Inc. “The Times has a strong franchise in business news, and then The Wall Street Journal can go directly at that and say, ‘We are the No. 1 business source and those of you using The New York Times business can go to us for free now.’” Mr. Doctor continued: “Business customers are among the most lucrative online, and if Murdoch takes them away, it’s the greatest hurt he could inflict.”

All this activity, combined with Mr. Murdoch’s very public declarations of his intention to challenge The Times, has left some top editors at the Gray Lady scratching their heads.

Dean Baquet, The Times’ Washington bureau chief, said he believes “The Journal has not, itself, figured out how it would change the mission of its Washington bureau.”

As for Mr. Keller, he told The Observer: “I don’t know what Murdoch really intends to do, but if his plan is to put money into serious, credible news gathering, that’s good for the country, good for the news business and good for us.”

He went on: “We have every reason to feel confident that we can hold our own if Murdoch decides to build The Journal beyond its business-reader base.” And he added: “In all the Murdoch parlor gaming, I don’t hear anyone suggesting that he would attempt to match the depth of our coverage in culture, science, education, health, religion, sports, lifestyle, etc., etc. Not to mention business coverage that even devout Journal readers find they can’t afford to miss.”

One way to hold off The Journal is to poach its talent. Since the Dow Jones deal was announced, Mr. Keller has held open slots on the Times staff, anticipating waves of refugees from The Journal as a result of Mr. Murdoch’s takeover. According to one Times staffer, it was expected that The Times “would have been able to pick people off left and right.”

But the mass exodus hasn’t yet materialized. According to sources at both papers, when The Times’ business editor, Larry Ingrassia, recently contacted several Journal reporters—including James Bandler and Mark Maremont, who together won a Pulitzer last year, along with several other Journal reporters, for their work on backdating stock options, as well as Melissa Marr, Kate Kelly and Mike Siconolfi, a Journal veteran of more than 20 years—about moving over, he came up empty-handed. (The sources stressed that Mr. Ingrassia didn’t make specific job offers.)

Indeed, it may be just as likely in the long run that the poaching goes the other way. In his June Time magazine interview, Mr. Murdoch mused: “What if, at The Journal, we spent $100 million a year hiring all the best business journalists in the world? Say, 200 of them.” What if, indeed.

Some analysts don’t think The Times has much to worry about—at least for now. “Murdoch can broaden the editorial base and he could damage The Times’ core readership base, but he would have to spend a lot of money,” said Ed Atorino of Benchmark Co. “The New York Times is a pretty strong franchise. At the least, it would take years to put a dent in The Times.”

But spending a lot of money is hardly something that Mr. Murdoch has been unwilling to do in the past. And Mr. Atorino admitted that the disparity in size and value between the two companies—News Corp.’s market capitalization stands at $69.6 billion, while the Times Company’s is just $2.7 billion—gives Mr. Murdoch some advantages. “News Corp can spend $5 billion without a dent,” he said, referring to how much the company is shelling out on Dow Jones.

It’s also no secret that the Times Company remains on precarious financial footing, This year it has already written down the value of New England Media Group—which includes The Boston Globe—by $814 million; sold some television affiliates; seen sharp advertising losses; faced a shareholder revolt, led by Morgan Stanley, against company leadership; and watched as The Times’ former West 43rd Street headquarters changed hands for $350 million more than Mr. Sulzberger unloaded it for in late 2004. And since 2003, the Times Company’s share price has plummeted from $46 to $19, while News Corp’s has risen from $17 to $24.

But don’t look for Mr. Murdoch to immediately gin up an all-out circulation battle, as he did when he used the New York Post to take on the Daily News. “Murdoch doesn’t need to defeat The New York Times, but if he could take away 3 to 5 percent of its business, then that’s going to hurt them when they’re already in a period of hurt,” Mr. Doctor said. “It’s not a knockout blow, but it makes the hill The Times has to climb even higher as they make the transition from print to digital.”

So the war could drag on. But as Mr. Murdoch is fond of saying, he may have another 20 years in him—his 98-year-old mother is still alive—and it remains to be seen whether Mr. Sulzberger has the stomach to beat off such an aggressive competitor. As Mr. Keller notes, The Times sits solidly at the top of the heap, but Mr. Murdoch has always been adept at leveraging his status as the underdog newcomer—even with a multibillion-dollar corporation behind him—into an asset.

In taking on The Times, Mr. Murdoch may have set himself his toughest challenge yet. But as Mr. Ailes pointed out this week to the FBN team, those predicting Mr. Murdoch’s failure in the past have almost always been off the mark.

John Koblin contributed reporting to this article.

For about a year, starting around the fall of 2003, Josh was one of my roommates in a three-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg (which I’m sadly leaving very soon to move to Washington D.C.). I can’t remember exactly when, because like most shares near the Lorimer 'L' stop, there’s an endless stream of Craigslist-users, 'hipsters,' and—in Postnomenclature—'Brooklyn eccentrics' moving in or out.

So I didn't really know Josh very well—say, well enough to determine whether he was engaged in performance art or a mental breakdown when he ran around Times Square naked yesterday. (Cover aside, the Post offers a slideshow, too.)

But he is a playwright by trade, and a smart witty guy, so it could all be some kind of situationist prank.

Occasionally he had a theater improv troupe over to the apartment, so live performances aren't new to him. But he was usually pretty low-key. And I never saw him eating weird scraps of food, as some anonymous Yalie claimed in the tabloid.

And for the record, I never saw him naked. Until today—on the cover of the Post.

Now that's what I call wood!

But the anecdote, published today in his book Reality Show, is old news.

In Mr. Kurtz’s book, he writes that former CBS anchor threatened to release a document to The New York Times if his now-widely-discredited National Guard story did not run on 60 Minutes. The threat was made to CBS News producer Josh Howard, according to Mr. Kurtz.

In fact, that same anecdote appeared two years earlier, in New York Press editor David Blum’s book about the long-running CBS show, tick… tick… tick…, according to Gawker, where you will find a painstaking side-by-side comparison.

We reached Mr. Kurtz a little before the Gawker item ran, after receiving a fax of the relevant pages in tick... tick... tick... from an agitated Mr. Blum. ("It doesn't seem like a scoop to me," Mr. Blum told Media Mob.)

“I was completely unaware of that,” Mr. Kurtz said by phone on Oct. 9, referring to the previous lives of his Dan Rather story.

So, apparently, was America's assignment editor, Matthew Drudge, who ate up the Kurtz "scoop" that was positioned at the top of a list of “fascinating revelations” sent out by Mr. Kurtz's publisher in a press release Sunday.

Mr. Kurtz was pretty pleased, and on his new and very frequently updated blog about the book, which you can visit here, wrote on Sunday night: "Reality Show is already picking up steam. Drudge is trumpeting a big item [the Rather item] here."

Mr. Kurtz told Media Mob he only "glanced at" the book, which he didn't have time to read when it came out two years ago. He said he owned a hardcover copy, but not the paperback edition of the book, where the Rather "revelation" appeared in an afterword. The paperback was published in 2005.

And both reporters got the scoop from the same source: news executive Josh Howard is named as the source to both. Double-dipping!

Mr. Kurtz described himself to The Media Mob as “a fanatic about attributing information.”

“Attribution," he said, "means 'this is where you got it.'”

Mr. Kurtz said that since he got the information directly from Mr. Howard, it didn't matter that the story had already been used elsewhere. Mr. Kurtz said he won't add an attribution to Mr. Blum's book in future editions.

The question is whether he will continue to tout the anecdote as a "scoop" in his upcoming appearances supporting the book.

From Mr. Kurtz's blog:

On Oct. 9, Mr. Kurtz was on the phone with The Observer, speaking about Reality Show, his 464-page tome chronicling the “last great television news war,” which hit bookstores that morning.

The book had started generating buzz two days earlier, thanks to the Drudge Report, which focused on a particular scoop that never found its way into the pages of The Post: Dan Rather, former CBS News anchor, threatened leaking the now-disputed National Guard memos to The New York Times if the 60 Minutes segment did not air.

How, then, had Mr. Kurtz been able to sit on that scoop, and others, for so long?

“The only way I was able to get these behind-the-scenes details, and candid conversations, was to tell people at the networks that this was a long-term project, and what they were telling me was not for the daily paper,” Mr Kurtz explained. “Had I not done that, I would have gotten the same spin everyone gets when you’re on deadline,”

“It wouldn’t have been bad in the column,” Post executive editor Leonard Downie told The Observer, “but I don’t mind having some things saved for the book.” Mr. Downie, an author himself, said he encourages Post reporters to write long-form books, and that it “makes people fuller journalists.”

For the past two years—and without taking any writing sabbatical—Mr. Kurtz has continued reporting breaking media stories for the paper while simultaneously conducting interviews with more than 125 people, on the condition that their words end up in the book, not the column.

“We had a shot at it anyway,” Mr. Downie said, of the Rather item, explaining that The Post was provided the opportunity to publish an excerpt for the Style section just prior to the pub date.

On Oct. 8, The Post ran a nearly 3,000-word Style piece by Mr. Kurtz, focusing on how the big three anchors—Charles Gibson, Brian Williams and Katie Couric—dealt with a seemingly endless war.

Indeed, Mr. Kurtz told The Observer that the “growing national division over the Iraq war provided a terrific plot line to measure what kind of influence these 6:30 newscasts still have.”

In addition, there’s been no shortage of network drama these past two years.

“My original thought was that all the network news divisions were going through this wrenching transformation, after two decades of Dan, Tom and Peter,” Mr. Kurtz said.

He continued: “It’s only after I began that Bob Woodruff was injured, Elizabeth Vargas got pregnant and Les Moonves hired Katie Couric. If you were casting a movie, you’d want those plot elements. But I didn’t know this going in.”

The last time Mr. Kurtz was similarly fortunate, he said, was when Spin Cycle, his book on the Clinton White House, was released shortly after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. (Could Matt Drudge be a lucky charm?)

Throughout the project, Mr. Kurtz said, he “worked overtime” for his newspaper—both in print and online.

That’s in contrast to Mr. Kurtz’s Post colleague (and best-selling author) Bob Woodward, who maintains his title of assistant managing editor but doesn’t have to trifle much with looming deadlines at the newspaper.

When asked about the difference, Mr. Kurtz chuckled, “I need Woodward’s book contract.”

But soon, a less predictable adversary—and one that could prove a tougher challenge—will arrive on the scene. Over the past five months, Rupert Murdoch has publicly suggested that, once he officially takes over The Journal’s corporate parent, Dow Jones, later this year, he intends to pour resources into the paper’s DC operation.

So what does that mean for the Gray Lady?

Mr. Baquet, and several high-ranking Times editors interviewed by The Observer, said they are watching closely to see if Mr. Murdoch puts News Corp.’s money where his mouth is, and tinkers greatly with the paper’s DNA.

“My guess is The Journal is not sure what they’re going to do,” Mr. Baquet said by phone on Oct. 8. “It’s easy to say, ‘I want to go head-to-head with The New York Times and Washington Post.’ But what does that mean?”

Indeed, while The Journal remains strong on beats where government and business overlap—lobbying, for instance, or the Federal Reserve—the paper doesn’t, say, have reporters assigned to every major presidential candidate, as The Times and Post do. Rather than cover every small political news development, The Journal has instead focused on less frequent but more deeply reported investigative pieces. Indeed, its coverage of electoral politics isn’t even as comprehensive as it has been in years past, when Al Hunt oversaw the bureau. “The Journal has a different mission in life,” Mr. Baquet said of the two papers.

One way in which The Journal might benefit from Mr. Murdoch’s deep pockets is in personnel. Indeed, it already has begun to try to lure Times staffers away. Recently, The Journal approached Helene Cooper, who covers the State Department for The Times, to gauge her interest in returning to the paper where she used to work. Ms. Cooper is staying put.

But a Times Washington bureau staffer said that while they expect The Journal to try poaching colleagues, Mr. Baquet’s arrival has improved the general mood and cut down on staff disgruntlement—quite a feat in a newsroom!

There are also internal discussions under way to beef up economics and regulatory coverage in the bureau, areas where The Journal is especially strong, according to Times staffers. There has even been talk of hiring a full-time lobbying reporter—a move that would clearly inch the paper closer into The Journal’s wheelhouse.

Mr. Baquet said that he “would love to make the case for more reporters across the bureau” and has “wanted to compete on regulatory stuff.” In such coverage, The Times, he said, has never had as many reporters assigned. Overall, he said, “you can’t let the competition set your game plan. On the other hand, it’s nuts not to watch the competition.”

Still, it might be a while before The Journal is viewed as a day-to-day competitor at the paper’s I Street headquarters. While numerous copies of The Washington Post are distributed throughout the Times Washington bureau, said one staffer, significantly fewer reporters receive The Journal. At this point, the staffer said, “it’s not a must-read.”

Here are the memos:

Folks,

It's truly with a heavy heart that I announce something that's already gotten around: Ethan is going to become Jerusalem bureau chief. The graceful writing and incisive story sense that marked his tenure as deputy he will now unleash on one of our most demanding assignments. It's going to be great fun for him, and I am going to miss him like crazy. He's been a great partner: sharp and quick on the news; deft and clear-headed in conceptualizing and editing stories; a compassionate ear for many of you; a source of great humor, calm, and kindness on our desk; and a stimulating, provocative presence that kept all of us, me not least, reaching higher. My loss will be the readers' gain.

Please consider this a formal posting for the deputy job. We are still working out the precise timing of Ethan's move -- some time in the first half of 2008.

Albest, Susan

We are delighted to announce that the powerful team of Barry Bearak and Celia Dugger will be back in action, this time in South Africa. We were able to lure Barry away from his distinguished turn as writer for the Times magazine and journalism professor and to persuade Celia to move her global poverty beat to Johannesburg. She and Barry will continue writing on that theme, as well as the extraordinary canvas that is southern Africa. They move this winter.

Steve Erlanger, whose three-plus years in Jerusalem have produced insight-filled coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ­ from the death of Arafat, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the Lebanon war, and the Hamas takeover of Gaza ­ will move to Paris early next year to become bureau chief.

Elaine Sciolino, who between her dazzling coverage of the French election and the Iran nuclear issue has been a linchpin in our coverage of terrorism in Europe, will take up terrorism and nuclear proliferation as her full-time beat in the coming year. She will remain Paris-based, but will travel around Europe tracking the rise of the jihadi threat, the IAEA and Iran's nuclear program. She will jointly report to Investigations and Foreign.

Craig Smith, who ranged from unrest in the banlieue to tumult in Eastern Europe to terrorism in Northern Africa, is beginning language training in Japanese this year, in preparation for moving to Tokyo over the summer.

Ed Wong, our prescient chronicler of Iraq, has finally torn himself away from the story he told so well and has begun Chinese training, in preparation for a move to Beijing this spring.

Bobby Worth, another stalwart on our Baghdad team, has been studying Arabic over the past year in preparation for replacing Hassan Fattah in the Mideast. We are still conferring about exactly where he will be based, but are delighted that we could pull off what has long been overdue ­ systematic Arabic training to help cover this crucial region.

Hassan Fattah, who has been an anchor for us in Dubai, dashing off to story after story around the region, is resigning to take up an exciting opportunity, becoming managing editor of a new English-language pan-Arab daily. Hassan originally came to our attention through his work founding Iraq Today, an English-language newspaper in Iraq. He will be mentoring young Arab journalists, and we wish him well. Thanassis Cambanis, who covered the region for the Boston Globe, will fill in over the next two months until Bobby is ready to move toward the end of this year.

Susan and Ethan

Having already worked seven rotations in Iraq since May 2004, Mr. Glanz didn’t need a beginner’s course in reporting the war to assume Mr. Burns’ old job. Instead, said Mr. Glanz, speaking by phone from Baghdad to The Observer, they mostly discussed arrangements for Mr. Hassan’s family. Mr. Burns told The Observer that the July 13 killing looms as “the dark cloud” over his five-year tenure—a monumental tour of duty that started before “shock and awe” and lasted through the “surge,” helping to turn Mr. Burns into the most visible face, and pen, of The Times’ Iraq coverage.

In the coming weeks, Mr. Burns, will start a new challenge as The Times’ London bureau chief. But he’s already digging up old wounds. In his first post-Iraq dispatches—stamped with London, and Cambridge, England, datelines—Mr. Burns has brought readers back to the front lines. “On a stifling summer’s day in Baghdad a couple of years ago …” began the most recent, a Sept. 23 piece on embattled security firm Blackwater USA.

But pressing local matters, including a possible parliamentary election, will soon compete for Mr. Burns’ attention. And as the journalist and self-described nomad, who turns 63 this Thursday, adjusts to life without armored cars and barbed wire fences, the move also represents a peculiar sort of homecoming.

“I’m a Brit by birth who has never worked in England,” Mr. Burns said last week by phone from McLean, Virginia. Before getting comfortable behind the London desk, Mr. Burns has been traveling in the U.S. Four days later, he was at Colby College, in Maine, to accept the Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism, which he dedicated to Mr. Hassan’s memory.

“This is not a war that you leave in your heart or your mind,” Mr. Burns put it to The Observer. The Times needed an experienced hand in London, but despite telling C-SPAN last February that he planned to be there by midsummer of this year, the story of the Iraq war had become all-consuming for him, he said, and he was reluctant to leave it behind. But since the war isn’t ending any time soon, Mr. Burns—The Times’ longest-serving foreign correspondent—eventually returned to the land of his birth. “Absent the London job,” he said, “it was never a job I’d want to give up.”

In London, Mr. Burns said, he has the “opportunity now to meet people who I haven’t set eyes upon in 40 years.” And there are other perks: Mr. Burns recently bought a bicycle, and he said that he can “learn to swing a five iron again and get fit in a way that is very difficult to do when you’re living in a walled compound.” But lifestyle changes won’t go too far: his trademark head of wild curls, he assured The Observer, will remain. “A man has to know who he is,” he said.

In leaving, Mr. Burns said his biggest concern was for the Iraqi employees of The Times. The Baghdad bureau is easily the paper’s largest and most expensive foreign outpost, employing well over 100 people—including many Iraqis who are far from immune from the turmoil going on outside the compound. “The pool of available people is shrinking,” Mr. Burns said, referring to the challenges of attracting Iraqi journalists. “Working for an American institution in Iraq—whether the embassy, armed forces or media organizations—carries with it a considerable hazard.”

Mr. Burns said that over time there has been an “exodus of staff members to Jordan and Syria.” At Colby, he recalled that during a farewell party at the bureau, he asked who would leave if they could, and every Iraqi staffer raised their hand. Indeed, Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi, a frequent contributor, is now on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard; and Ali Adeeb, who managed the Iraqi reporters, and joined Mr. Glanz and Mr. Burns for their breakfast meeting in Amman, is starting a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan.

“You can’t just put an ad in the paper and have 30 candidates e-mail you with their CV’s attached,” Mr. Glanz said, acknowledging the issue. “The logistics of everything, including hiring people, and getting to know who’s out there, is tough in Baghdad.”

However, Mr. Glanz said that the bureau under his watch is “not doing so bad,” and mentioned a 4,300-word Sept. 9 cover story (and accompanying interactive Web feature), with a co-byline for Damien Cave and Stephen Farrell, that assessed the success on the ground of the “surge” and included 16 other contributors—most of them Iraqis.

In addition to rotating Times staffers, and Iraqi employees, Mr. Glanz might have one more visitor: “I imagine I will find myself back in Baghdad,” Mr. Burns said. And his wife has remained in Baghdad as bureau manager.

Looking back on the bureau, Mr. Burns recalled a moment when a senior Iraqi staffer told him that The Times “made it possible for us within these walls to be Iraqis—not Shia, Sunnis, Kurds or Christians.”

“We achieved something within the walls of our compound which America seeks to achieve in Iraq,” said Mr. Burns. “We did create a civil society within those four walls.”

“If I’m proud of anything of my time in Baghdad,” he added, “I think we did accomplish that.”

It was a very civil discussion, titled "Building a Global Multi-Ethnic Community." But Mr. Murdoch did face some tough questions from the moderator, former President of Ireland Mary Robinson.

Ms. Robinson mentioned "how a lot of reporting on what we call the War on Terrorism" includes "references to Muslim extremists that hurt so much in that region." She also questioned the use of very harsh language in the media to describe undocumented migrants.

"How would you respond to the sense that the media is part of the problem?" she asked.

"The question of the media and how it reports things like the War on Terror—the War on Terror is a very real thing," Mr. Murdoch said.

"Do you accept that using terminology like Muslim extremists has been hurtful and yet very common?" she asked.

"It has been the case in the Middle East," Mr. Murdoch said, holding his ground.

"I mean, there were Catholic extremists in Northern Ireland" he continued. "There were Protestant extremists in Northern Ireland. That's how they define themselves."

The Observer noted that the Murdoch-owned Post neglected to mention Mr. Varadarajan’s harsh criticism of the News Corp. chief while Mr. Varadarajan wrote for the editorial page. In addition to lashing out at Mr. Murdoch and his son James, Mr. Varadarajan had also taken The Post to task for their coverage of China.

At the time, Mr. Varadarajan was contacted by The Observer, and has now responded via email: “This is NOT—although people have jumped to the conclusion that it is—Murdoch-related.”

Mr. Varadarajan also wrote that he is excited to return to academia, and will be starting at NYU’s Stern School in mid-October. His last day at the Journal will be September 30th.

As for the impending Murdoch takeover?

“I'm inclined to believe that Rupert Murdoch will be a force for positive change and general non-pomposity at the Journal,” he wrote.

On September 17, the paper announced that it would launch Pursuits, a glossy magazine supplement covering the exploits of the superrich. The press release sent out by The Journal quoted publisher Gordon Crovitz and managing editor Marcus Brauchli—but according to one staffer, the prototype for the new venture had already passed through the hands of Mr. Murdoch, who gave it the green light.

To be sure, Pursuits was conceived long before Mr. Murdoch began his flirtation with the Bancroft family, which currently controls Dow Jones. And he likely did little more than sign off last week—the heavy lifting was overseen by Robert Frank, the magazine’s anticipated editor, and Journal deputy managing editor Mike Miller, before Mr. Murdoch even arrived. But one staffer suggests that Mr. Murdoch’s enthusiasm for magazine supplements (Page Six Magazine!), combined with his stamp of approval on this one may have pushed the business side into action.

Pursuits certainly fits in well with Mr. Murdoch’s plans. The magazine, say staffers, appears designed to compete with How to Spend It, the Financial Times’ monthly glossy. Mr. Murdoch appears eager to provoke a broader showdown between the two papers: It was recently reported that News Corp. president Peter Chernin, believed to be speaking with the approval of his boss, said his company “will crush” the FT.

Magazines aside, Mr. Murdoch has also begun to engage with the editorial side of the daily paper. It was widely noted when, on Sept. 12, he took a stroll through the Journal newsroom and held a three-hour meeting with editors. But that same afternoon, according to staffers, he also paid a visit to the Money & Investing department, where, with editors Nik Deogun and Ken Brown, Mr. Murdoch discussed a piece for the following day that reported on oil prices approaching $80 a barrel. And this past Friday, another staffer observed the 76-year old News Corp. chief touring the WSJ.com offices and television studio with Mr. Brauchli and executive online editor Alan Murray.

Meanwhile, say staffers, Mr. Murdoch has begun setting up an office for himself, near other senior Dow Jones executives on the 11th floor.

But it’s in The Journal’s Washington operation where Mr. Murdoch’s presence, perhaps indirectly, appears to be having its most significant effect. Last May, he told The Times that he intended to increase political coverage and “might put more emphasis on Washington.” Mr. Brauchli—still only four months into his tenure—appears to have beaten him to the punch, on Sept. 19 naming John Bussey, known as a talented, aggressive editor, as the new bureau chief. In addition, Boston bureau chief Gary Putka, who’d been rumored to be a candidate for the Washington bureau chief job, and is also known as a tenacious competitor, will soon be overseeing some coverage of homeland security and national affairs remotely, but in coordination with Boston and D.C. bureau reporters, according to a staffer. “Marcus might want to make big changes sooner rather than later,” said one D.C. bureau staffer, since it’s clear that moves will have to be made anyway. By doing so, he “puts his own stamp on it.”

“I think this is all a sign of coming expansion in Washington,” said Gerald Seib, who’s leaving the bureau chief job for two new roles, assistant managing editor and executive Washington editor. Mr. Seib said that the bureau plans to increase Web coverage, and expects political reporters to eventually appear on the Fox Business Network.

Several staffers told The Observer that while they expected some shake-up in the bureau, the selection of Mr. Bussey, who’ll take up his new post on Nov. 1, caught them off guard. For one thing, Mr. Bussey has spent much of his Journal career reporting and editing on international issues—the recent Daniel Pearl biopic, A Mighty Heart, shows him in his role as foreign editor. Then there’s a widely circulated memo from June, in which Mr. Brauchli wrote that Mr. Bussey would leave his editor position in Asia to “take on a significant new writing assignment”—which never happened. And lastly, multiple staffers said the two men simply do not get along; perhaps, one staffer speculated, it dates back to the time that Mr. Bussey oversaw Mr. Brauchli as a foreign correspondent. (Both Mr. Brauchli and Mr. Bussey declined to comment.)

Mr. Murdoch’s looming presence may also be having an effect in another sphere. Several times over the past few months, he’s expressed his preference for shorter, newsier front-page stories. Sure enough, a 400-word piece on M.I.T’s miscalculation of S.A.T scores in the September 22-23 Weekend Journal didn’t jump past page one. That sure looks like a new direction, though a Journal spokesman said the format is used “once in a great while.”