Journal Breaking Deal With BreakingViews

More changes at the Wall Street Journal under Rupert Murdoch.

The newspaper has told Hugo Dixon, founder of Breakingviews.com, that it plans to stop running a daily column of items from the financial commentary website.

At the same time, the Journal has hired two columnists from the rival Financial Times to provide original commentary, according to the Guardian.

"They're seeking to buy us out of our contract," Dixon, a former Lex columnist at Financial Times, told Reuters.

BreakingViews' contract with the News Corp. owned newspaper was scheduled to run through 2009.

Instead of buying analysis from a former Lex columnist, the Journal has hired two current contributors to that influential daily feature: Thorold Barker and Liam Denning.

News Corp. declined to tell the Guardian what Barker and Denning will do at the Journal, though the two men contributed New York items to Lex and would be natural fits to revive the Journal's moribund "Heard on the Street" column.

In an nice bit of symmetry, Financial Times said it has hired John Paul Rathbone, a former contributor to BreakingViews.com, as deputy editor of Lex. That column has a staff of 12 and will be edited by former South Asia bureau chief based in Jo Johnson, who is relocating to London from New Delhi.

by Mark Stein

(Jeff Bercovici is on vacation.)