There are few weeks when Rupert Murdoch is not making the news. One suspects that he's used to it - His company is called News Corp, after all.

One moment, Murdoch is grabbing MySpace. The next, he is swearing his media company will be carbon neutral by 2010. We assume this means carefully recycling all those newspapers he buys.

To quote an old shaving ad from the 1980s, when Rupert loves a paper enough, he buys the company.

Murdoch's appetite for buying the news caught the attention of media watchers again this week. By offering US$5 billion to buy Dow Jones, owners of the Wall Street Journal, Murdoch set printing presses in motion again.

Many were aghast. Murchoch could buy The Times in Britain, but the rock-solid Wall Street Journal? For Devin Leonard of Fortune magazine, even the question of WSJ's sale is a sign of the times for the industry.

"For the longest time, the paper wouldn’t have been for sale, but now there’s a lot of uncertainty about newspapers... You might say Murdoch is a shark who smells blood in the water — it’s the time to bite."

As Leonard cites a steady flow of advertisers from newspapers to online, those who see Murdoch's bid as a boost for hard copy media formats may also be mistaken. WSJ is one of only a few anamolies among newspapers - in its ability to charge readers (800,000 in total) for its online edition. According to Leonard, such moves prove Murdoch is "a lot more Web-savvy than a lot of other media company CEOs".

What would be the implications of such a buy? Critics of Murdoch's right-leaning politics fear the impact that the editorial pages of the WSJ could have on the Democratic Party's chance of electing the next US president. Murdoch of course stated he was committed to maintaining WSJ's editorial independence. Media watchers agreeed meddling with finance news would be bad for business.

Staff on the Wall Street Journal, confronting the idea of calling those at Fox News colleagues, were not amused. An anoymous staffer told The New York Observer, "It's out of the frying pan and into a thermonuclear blast. This was the worst-case scenario - other than being sold to Vladimir Putin."

Media watchers like the Guardian report Murchoch's plans for Dow Jones are "well advanced" - including rebranding the planned Fox business channel under the Journal brand name. Then the media word of the day? Convergence. Watch as newspaper, broadcast and online work in tandem. Add in a new-web community like MySpace, and the implications are as broad in media as you can go. Putin, eat your heart out.

News of the News bid did not come in isolation. Murdoch shared the limelight with an offer by Canadian group Thomson for news and financial data service Reuters.

As a Wall Street media watcher might say, these stories have far from "played out". At press time, some were predicting Murdoch may have gone cold for now on the Dow Jones bid. But like many industries, the ever-shrinking number of fish in the media pond is sure to have raised fears of job losses and potential damage to editorial independence.

As the Guardian puts it, the battle lines for business news have been drawn.

"The twin bids shone a light on the global battle for financial news provision that has pitched Reuters, Thomson, Bloomberg, Dow Jones and Financial Times owner Pearson against one another in a global battle for supremacy."