News Corp to move Journal from financial district

By Robert MacMillan

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Wall Street Journal is moving uptown. Nearly 6 months after being bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, the business daily's news staff will move to the company's headquarters at 1211 Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan.

The widely expected move should begin in February or March next year. It will take the Journal several miles away from Wall Street, the financial heart of New York and a stone's throw from where it has resided for two decades.

The Dow Jones Newswires editorial staff will move to the same location from their offices in Jersey City, New Jersey.

"At (the plan's) heart is our wish to bring together the news operations ... making 1211 the hub of a global information-gathering operation," Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton wrote in a message to employees on Thursday.

Moving the newspaper is the latest change Murdoch has made since buying the Journal's parent company, Dow Jones & Co, in December.

Earlier this week, Murdoch appointed longtime associate Robert Thomson as managing editor at the paper. He also has been augmenting its political and general news coverage and publicly expressed a desire for shorter articles.

"Uniting our two prime financial news organizations will provide the opportunity to reconsider conventions of the past and how we meet, move, communicate and work in the future," Hinton wrote.

The Journal moved into 1 World Financial Center, which is owned by Brookfield Properties Corp, in the mid-1980s. It was there the paper covered the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, for which it won a Pulitzer Prize.

Some employees have been anxious to move so they do not have a visual daily reminder of the events that day and because of the ongoing reconstruction project at the site.

The Journal and Dow Jones Newswires will be closer to Murdoch's other prized U.S. media property, the racy New York Post tabloid paper. Staff at the Barron's business weekly and the MarketWatch.com financial news website will move to News Corp's headquarters as well.

Some other staff will move to a nearby property on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Dow Jones' enterprise, consumer and corporate departments will stay in Princeton, New Jersey, Hinton wrote.

The Dow Jones lease on the space it was renting at World Financial Center expires in 2019. A Dow Jones spokesman was not immediately available to say what the company plans to do with the lease.

(Additional reporting by Ilaina Jonas, editing by Richard Chang and Andre Grenon)