In this month’s edition of the The New Yorker, Ken Auletta seeks to answer the question “What is Robert Thomson doing at the Wall Street Journal?” There are two answers, judging from the article: He is the paper’s managing editor because he happens to be a close friend of NewsCorp head Rupert Murdoch and because he’s a no-nonsense editor aimed at targeting “a culture of complacency” in his newsroom – even if this means slashing staff.

Yesterday, Poynter Online’s Jim Romensko posted a memo that Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson sent to that paper’s entire staff. In the message, Thomson announces that two News Corp. employees—Journal Deputy Managing Editor Jim Pensiero and Gabriella Stern, Newswires‘ Senior Editor for global news—will be leading a new “Special Project” at the company. Pernsiero is to be the project’s Editor-in-Chief, while Stern will be his Managing Editor.

From New York Times executive editor Bill Keller’s 2008 letter to the George Polk committee. It was this letter that WSJ managing editor Robert Thomson was referring to when he accused Keller of “casting aspersions” on the Journal. Hmm.

In this morning’s New York Times, media columnist David Carr counted himself among the “chorus of journalism church ladies” who “warned that one of the crown jewels of American journalism now resided in the hands of a roughneck” when it was sold to Rupert Murdoch two years ago. And after charging that the paper developed a conservative bias, the Wall Street Journal‘s editor-in-chief Robert Thomson is firing back.

The Wall Street Journal makes its home at the intersection of business and journalism, two industries that increasingly rely on speed — speedy information that is. In a move to keep up with the increasingly rapid flow of information on the Internet — not to mention beat the competition in the ever-tightening print market — The Wall Street Journal will no longer participate in traditional news embargoes unless their reporters are getting exclusive access.

Today we look at the top ten results in our Newspaper/Online Editors category. Turns out it’s a pretty solid snapshot of the changing, and unchanging, face of media this year. The fact that the NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller is riding high in the #1 spot will probably not come as a shock. So perhaps the question you are left asking is “who the heck is Brian Lam?”