• The Guardian, Tuesday, November 3, 2009 9:30 AM

A slim Australian with a sharp tongue and a penchant for ultra-skinny ties has become the most powerful newspaper editor in America. The Wall Street Journal's editor Robert Thomson has charted the paper's circulation gains and is fast becoming News Corp.'s attack dog in a campaign to re-engineer the industry's failing business model.

To get its circulation numbers, the WSJ has spent heavily on marketing and has offered cheap deals on print subscriptions, say industry experts. "Discounting and sales pressure have clearly contributed to this circulation gain," says Ken Doctor, a publishing analyst.

Now News Corp. wants to erect pay walls on the Internet. But critics smell hypocrisy in Thomson's recent bashing of Google because the paper could easily remove itself from Google's universe. Jack Shafer, media critic at Slate, also argues that Thomson's boss Rupert Murdoch is hardly a moral arbiter of fair compensation for journalistic output. "Murdoch says not paying for journalism cheapens it, but he was responsible for driving the price down of all newspapers in the UK," says Shafer.

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