Murdoch Will Do More Than Shake Up Dow Jones Management. He’ll Shake Up The News and Business Category.

Implications: Rupert Murdoch is already making one thing clear: Under NewsCorp, the new Dow Jones will not look or operate like the old Dow Jones.  That will make life interesting for its own and many more media brands.

Analysis: For months, Dow Jones management has signaled its resistance (or lack of imagination) when it comes to embracing a new, more aggressive, more global vision for the venerable-but-fading publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

But things are changing.  A new CEO and a new publisher at the Journal are just the first steps in putting the team in place that will embrace Murdoch’s vision, integrate Dow Jones brands into the global plans of NewsCorp, and make life a lot more interesting for readers, advertisers and DJ’s employees and competitors.

Here’s an early assessment as to what it means for some of the most affected “content” brands.

National Newspapers:  Winners: WSJ and USA Today.  Loser: NY Times.  A re-energized Journal will breathe new life into the category and remind advertisers that millions still read national print newspapers each day.  The Journal and Gannett’s USA Today will be the winners, retaining a first-or-second-read status for their at-home and business-travel audiences.  The New York Times will see its national circulation ambitions severely challenged, especially beyond the northeast.

Magazines: Losers: Time and Newsweek. There are no real winners among news and business magazines.  With the Journal and the Times battling even more fiercely in general news and political reporting, the weekly newsmagazines will continue to decline in relevance and influence.  Business Week will also face new challenges.

Online: Winners: WSJ, NYT, Marketwatch.  Losers: Forbes.  The Times has already seen rapid traffic growth since abandoning Times Select, proving that millions of people are hungry for content (but not quite hungry enough to pay for it). A free WSJ website is coming soon.  And that will mean more visibility for WSJ stories all day and every day, more links from the blogosphere and more visibility all around as NewsCorp promotes WSJ’s news and business reporting across its other platforms.  In the old Dow Jones, a free WSJ would have been a threat to Marketwatch.  But in the new Dow Jones, more traffic to WSJ will mean more traffic to a better-defined and better-marketed Marketwatch site aimed at retail investors.  All of this is bad news for other general business sites, especially Forbes.

International: Winner: WSJ.  Loser: Financial Times.  Murdoch (and his son James, now in charge of NewsCorp’s European and Asian businesses) will renew The Journal’s global ambitions and make the Journal brand a more accessible source of news (across all platforms).  This will not be a return to the days of expensive efforts to increase print circulation, but a more integrated media effort.  The FT will likely suffer.

More twists and turns will be added to the tale in the months ahead (have we heard the last of NewsCorp-LinkedIn?), but Murdoch is already signaling his intent to make life a lot more interesting for Dow Jones and its competitors.