A tipster is telling us that the Wall Street Journal's fabled Page One staff will be dissolved into the news desk. Page One editor Mike Williams would become a "roving features editor," which sounds much less powerful. The Page One desk is responsible, among other things, for the often breezy but always well-researched A-Hed feature, which has been increasingly marginalized as the Journal's front page gets newsier. Its disbanding would mark only the latest move by new editor Robert Thomson to remake the Journal in the image of the Financial Times, Thomson's former employer and a favorite of ultimate Journal overlord Rupert Murdoch. In fact, the paper's old guard is said by our insider to be grumbling that recent FT-like stories, like the front page article on alleged flaws in the Libor benchmark lending rate, are shoving aside "stories that appeal beyond the circle of Murdoch's friends in the global elite." But not all veteran editors are suffering under a cluster of changes said to be coming down in the coming days.

John Bussey-the Wall Street Journal's DC bureau chief and one of the candidates touted for the newspaper's vacant managing editor position-probably won't get the nod from the Journal's new owners. To be sure, he's won respect from Rupert Murdoch's lieutenants for masterminding the newspaper's election coverage; one of them, Journal publisher Robert Thomson knows Bussey drive from their days together as rival foreign correspondents in Tokyo; and his less whiny underlings give Bussey credit for energizing the sleepy bureau in the capital. But Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici reckons Rupert Murdoch's lieutenants will bring in someone uncontaminated by the business newspaper's rather insular culture; and we're sticking by our original prediction that Robert Thomson will pull a Dick Cheney and nominate himself for the managing editor role (much like I have at Gawker). Anyway, it's too bad. Bussey has made a lot of enemies during his years at the Journal-and the backstabbing colleagues are offering a smorgasbord of delicious anecdotes about the newspaper exec that we'd love to have better reason to relay.

Of all the cliques at the Wall Street Journal, the reporters and editors of the newspaper's Money & Investing team were most inclined to accommodate to the new régime put in place by Rupert Murdoch. They're more financially sophisticated than the average Journal reporter, and less precious; the head of the paper's third section is thought friendly with Murdoch aide Gary Ginsberg, and has even been mentioned as a candidate for managing editor; and Money & Investing is widely regarded as the newsiest part of the Journal, in need of less of a re-education than the self-indulgent feature writers of the main paper and the second section, Marketplace. And that's why this week's disastrous pep talk by the Australian media mogul's key lieutenant, Journal publisher Robert Thomson, is so damaging.