By erecting a paywall around The Times and The Sunday Times online, Rupert Murdoch is once more shaking up Fleet Street and leading the way to what he hopes will be a more profitable existence. I doubt whether his heart is in it.

Mr Murdoch is clearly enthusiastic about his latest, quixotic newspaper war with The New York Times. He has added a Greater New York section to his Wall Street Journal to compete head on with the NYT and slashed advertising rates to undercut a liberal establishment institution that he despises.

That is the media baron we have known since he took control of The Times and The Sunday Times in 1981, pushed the titles downmarket and started a price war with the Daily Telegraph. Bigger headlines, shorter stories, more general news, less specialist information; that has always been the Murdoch formula, now on show at the Journal.