Murdoch Lifer Mans Main Street Journal

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- It's already been eight months since Rupert Murdoch plucked Les Hinton from London to run Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, and Mr. Hinton does not like to dawdle. "In media and media-executive jobs, the ponderous do not survive," he told Advertising Age. But to appreciate his moves -- not to mention his relationship with Mr. Murdoch, whose $5.6 billion acquisition of Dow Jones last December shook the industry -- we have to go back to 1959. Les Hinton was a 15-year-old son of working-class Brits looking for a new life in Australia. He walked into a little afternoon paper in Adelaide, asked for office work and got it. "Then I was sort of buying Rupert his sandwiches for lunch," he recalled. As it happened, The Adelaide News was young Mr. Murdoch's first and only daily paper. Mr. Hinton has served him in different capacities ever since, with the exception of a couple of years in England working for United Press International and then for a paper again. "Rupert bought the newspaper," Mr. Hinton said. "At that point I stopped running." The whole world has more or less stopped running from Mr. Murdoch, whose News Corp. controls media properties including 20th Century Fox, MySpace, Fox Broadcasting, Fox News, HarperCollins, Sky Italia, BSkyB and News Outdoor. It also owns a ton of newspapers, led by a new flagship in the Journal. Les Hinton speaks

Murdoch Lifer Mans Main Street Journal

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