In an interview with the Journal—the crown jewel of his quarantined newspaper business— Mr. Murdoch denied that his decision was influenced by the so-called "Murdoch Discount." The Murdoch Discount is the theory that News Corp. shares trade at less than what they're worth because the company is run at Mr. Murdoch's whim and he's liable to do things like, say, grossly overpay for The Wall Street Journal.

"I don't give a ---- about that," he told the Journal.

Judging from Journal precedent, the four letter word at play was not "damn."

The 1984 Emery Roth & Sons-designed building hosted ad-sales offices for The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, the Dow Jones Newswire and the publisher's other business-to-business products for more than a decade before Rupert Murdoch moved the Dow Jones newsrooms into News Corp. headquarters, three blocks north at 47th Street in June of 2009.

This time around, Dow Jones negotiated with the Durst Organization for renovations of the third-floor bathrooms as part of the renewal. The company is planning to do some work of its own too. "We are doing some updates in the space to make it a more efficient workplace for us, but nothing major," said Howard Hoffman, a spokesman for Dow Jones. "No major renovations are planned."

Tim Dempsey, Ken Rapp and Mary Ann Tighe at CB Richard Ellis, who represented the tenant, declined to comment.

The Dow Jones floors at 1155 Avenue of the Americas were never listed publicly by the Durst Organization, but other spaces in the building are on the market. The entire 11th floor is being listed now for $60 per square foot. Suites on the fourth and 10th floors are listed for $55.

zturner@observer.com / @zekeft

WSJ., launched in 2008 as an answer to The New York Times' T Magazine, is gearing up for its expansion from four issues a year to nine, a transition that will begin in March 2011, and 10 issues in 2012. In July, WSJ. announced that former Domino editor Deborah Needleman would take over for the departing Gaudoin. Her tenure begins with the December issue. 

The full press release is below:

NEW YORK, Oct. 27, 2010 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Wall Street Journal today named Anthony Cenname as publisher of WSJ. magazine, the Journal's glossy lifestyle magazine. As publisher, he will oversee all advertising and marketing initiatives for WSJ. and develop strategies to drive revenue in the luxury categories through print, online, other digital properties and strategic partnerships. Mr. Cenname joined the Journal in May 2009 as multimedia sales director for the Luxury group. 

"Our magazine business is growing at an opportune time, as the consumer and luxury categories rebound and the market improves," said Michael Rooney, chief revenue officer, The Wall Street Journal. "With Anthony's strong, proven track record and relationships combined with his passion for the business, I am excited for the magazine's continued success."

Mr. Cenname replaces Sophie Raptis, who has been named European sales director for the Journal, focusing on consumer and luxury products across the region.  She will relocate to London and work closely with the Journal's sales teams in Europe to further the expansion of WSJ. magazine and WSJ Weekend.  Ms. Raptis joined WSJ. magazine in August 2009 as publisher, having previously served as international business group head for Times Media in London. 

The Journal recently announced an increase in frequency for WSJ. beginning in March 2011, when nine issues will be published, followed by 10 issues in 2012. The magazine launched as a quarterly publication in September 2008 and transitioned to a schedule of six issues per year in March 2010. 

Since launch, WSJ. magazine has attracted 88 new advertisers to the Journal franchise – 48 of which have subsequently increased their exposure with other Journal properties.

 

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

"Hey @politico," he wrote on his Twitter account this afternoon, "do I have to say it again? FUCK YOU. How about posing this in a policy angle? Can't do that, huh."

We emailed Mr. Rubenfeld to ask if he had anything to add. He didn't. Attitude reflects leadership.

UPDATE: "This is my personal Twitter," Mr. Rubenfeld wrote in a later email.

(h/t Azi Paybarah)

The biggest intraday drop in the history of the Dow, nearly 1,000 points, didn't happen because of a calamity: No monuments had been burned and not a single colossal European country had defaulted. It just came. And then it went. The Dow was up above 10,500 by the end of the afternoon, and then back to 10,800 on Monday, after a trillion-dollar bailout package for Greece was announced. "We're on to the next freaky thing," a banking executive said this week, less than seven days after the Great Fall.

Is a terrifying and bizarrely opaque 1,000-point free fall another thing that is just going to happen on Wall Street every now and then? If so, will we know why? More pointedly, have we learned anything from the terrifying and bizarrely opaque events of the past year and a half? "We hope to be able to provide investors and the public with more information soon on the events that may have contributed to this volatility," the S.E.C. chairman, Mary Schapiro, told a Congressional subcommittee Tuesday, "but we should recognize that it will take time to fully analyze the data."

The night before, in a corner of the joint book party he threw for the scholars Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini, the hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin did not want to bother parsing the stock market's Thursday collapse. "Why did it fall on Wednesday? Why did it fall on Friday?" said Mr. Griffin, who is 68 slots ahead of Mr. Ross on this year's Forbes billionaires list. "People make up stories after the fact."

JAMES GORMAN, MORGAN Stanley's new chief executive, was alone in his 40th-floor office after a Thursday lunch when he saw the market wobbling. He called Suzanne Charnas, his head of investor relations. "Oh, God, what's happening?" they said. Mr. Gorman thought it must have been some kind of mistake.

Vikram Pandit was in a meeting at Citi headquarters. Another executive interrupted with the news. The chief executive stayed to finish the meeting, and then he collected staff in his office to talk. Steve Schwarzman was at Blackstone's annual conference with limited partners at the Waldorf Astoria. A senior executive at AIG had all-day meetings. "I was in a cocoon all day," the executive said. "Sometimes it's good to be in cocoon."

At 2:30, just before the crash, a former principal at Long Term Capital Management was walking out of a lunch with a hedge fund manager when he saw that the Dow was down a couple of hundred of points. "Not your best," he said. He went to another meeting, which lasted until 3:15, after the fall and rise. On his iPhone, he checked a couple of his stocks. One that normally trades for around $3.50 was down 20 cents. "And I took a look at the low, and the low was down 75 cents. And I said, 'No, that's a misprint. Then I looked at other stocks.'" He realized what had happened while standing in the street.

It was not particularly loud or chaotic at the suburban Kansas City headquarters of BATS, the third-largest exchange in the country, right behind New York's and Nasdaq. "Is it Greece? What's going on?" Joe Ratterman, the CEO, asked aloud.

At Goldman Sachs, gossip was floating around the investment management division that Citigroup had caused the fall with some sort of mammoth trading error. Silly Citigroup! An executive at another bank heard the same thing and told a newspaper reporter. CNBC heard it, too, and put up a story saying that a Citi trader may have inadvertently pressed a "b" for billion, not a "m" for million, in a trade that may or may not have involved Procter & Gamble. This was given a name: It was called the fat-finger theory. And the fat-fingered investigation had a focus: CNBC said there was a strange sale of 16 billion E-mini S&P 500 futures, traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

In Chicago, alongside the S&P 500 futures pit, a 38-year-old squawk-box broadcaster named Ben Lichtenstein, a man with a stadium-size voice of gravel and amphetamines, narrated the dive as it happened. "Guys this is probably the craziest I've seen it down here!" he shrieked. On a recording that was immediately passed around on Web sites like Zero Hedge, he narrated the fall number by number. It was pandemonium. "This will blow people out in a big way that you won't even believe!" he screamed in between a stream of numbers. After work, he went to his daughter's soccer practice, then his son's baseball practice, and then went out with a client.

THE NEXT MORNING, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange confirmed that Citigroup's activity did not appear to be irregular or unusual. And by late Friday, the Obama administration had sent out word that a fat finger did not, in fact, start the biggest collapse in Dow history.

So what did? Traders had been itchy about the Greek debt crisis and the British election-but nothing astounding had happened that afternoon with either. Was it hackers or terrorists? Ms. Schapiro said Tuesday that it didn't look like it.

The New York Stock Exchange blamed Nasdaq. Nasdaq blamed the New York Stock Exchange. Then Nasdaq blamed the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Was it the machines? On Friday, both The Journal and The Times had articles about high-frequency trading, the gargantuan but relatively new industry that uses algorithms to buy and sell. When the market falls to a certain level, both articles said, high-speed firms' computers are programmed to sell automatically to protect against more and more losses. The firm Tradebot Systems, another enormous Kansas City-based firm, even said that its computers shut down entirely. A "computer glitch at even just one firm could trigger a wave of selling that sets off huge losses across financial markets," a Journal story about the New York Stock Exchange's upcoming 400,000-square-foot high-speed hub in suburban New Jersey said last year. The new hub was nicknamed Project Alpha.

By Sunday, Senator Chris Dodd was on Face the Nation, complaining about "very fancy computers that can move in microseconds." At the book party the next night, Mr. Griffin, the hedge fund manager, held up a glass of Champagne with Maria Bartiromo to toast the Bremmer and Roubini books. "I think that it's much easier," he said in a conversation afterward, "to try and blame faceless computers."

The next day, another Journal article said that a $7.5 million trade for 50,000 options contracts from a hedge fund advised by Nassim Taleb, famous for the book Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, "may have played a key role in the stock-market collapse." It did not mention that the paperback version of Mr. Taleb's book was released that morning.

mabelson@observer.com

(with apologies to Brokers With Hands on Their Faces)

View slideshow >

Oh, and by the way, the February numbers are the highest on record. That's not  terribly surprising since the numbers on CitiHabitats’ website only go back to 2007.

Still, the question now is how far the numbers are going to climb. If the stock of idle apartments continues to tick ever upwards, landlords will be forced to slash their rents just to keep apace with the slackening demand. We’ve already seen landlords offer concession after concession in order to get their apartments occupied, but steeper cuts in asking rents may be in order. Since August, the average Manhattan-wide rents for studios, one-bedroom, two-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments have fallen by $155, $263, $238 and $467, respectively. While the yearly savings add up to a nice chunk of disposable income, it’s not a huge shift.

So how much further are rents going to fall? Ask Mr. Dow Jones.  

So where exactly are those 95 people going? Not to The Wall Street Journal.

A spokesman for The Journal, Bob Christie, told Media Mob that those new hires will all be assigned to Dow Jones news wires, not at The Journal. Mr. Christie reminds us, however, that wire copy can be used, of course, inside the pages of The Journal.

And what's the time frame for these hires? He said they'll start now, and there's no end date in mind. So, conceivably, Mr. Thomson can take as long as he wants to hire.

The lawyer, Stuart Karle, had been with the newspaper since 1992. Yesterday afternoon Mr. Karle was called into the office of Dow Jones' counsel, Mark Jackson, who was formerly the associate chief counsel of HarperCollins and was made the chief counsel of Dow Jones on Dec. 17, two workdays after Mr. Murdoch closed on his sale of the company.

Mr. Karle was told he was fired and he had to leave the paper by the end of March, according to a person familiar with the situation. Two newsroom sources said that the paper's managing editor, Marcus Brauchli, had no say in the decision.

The Journal newsroom today, described one staffer, is "stunned."

"We're pissed," said another. "Stuart understands our culture, he comes from within our culture. Why is Murdoch bringing in someone from HarperCollins? Symbolically, it's a bad move. It doesn't give you a lot of confidence that Murdoch really values the culture of this place."

Mr. Karle, when reached by phone, confirmed that he was fired and added: "I love all the work I've done here."