Rupert Murdoch on Tuesday said he was leaning towards dropping the Wall Street Journal's policy of charging for access to its website, saying this was "right on the front burner" of decisions to make once his $5bn takeover of Dow Jones was completed.

"That looks like the way we're going," Mr Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corp, said at a Goldman Sachs conference in Manhattan.

News Corp's acquisition of Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal, was expected to be completed by December, Mr Murdoch said.

Dropping the charges would follow a move this week by The New York Times to end its online subscription service, and would leave the Financial Times as one of the few large newspapers to charge for significant parts of its online content.

Mr Murdoch said he ex-pected a cut in the Journal's online subscription charges to result in a short-term revenue loss of about $30m, but more than that could be gained from offering the audience search services and from other online advertising to a larger audience.

Mr Murdoch said the audience for wsj.com could grow to 10m-15m from the current 1m, giving advertisers access to an "affluent, influential" group.

News Corp, which owns the social networking site MySpace, focuses on allowing advertisers to target specific audiences. Such "hyper-targeting" would allow MySpace to double its revenues, Mr Murdoch said.

Mr Murdoch also said the planned new Fox Business Network, to launch on October 15 in the US, would use Wall Street Journal reporters. A contract between the business channel CNBC, part of GE's NBC Universal, and the Wall Street Journal gives CNBC exclusive access to Journal reporters covering business news.

Mr Murdoch said Fox Business could use Journal reporters covering politics, lifestyle, travel and other areas.

Following his $5bn cash offer for Dow Jones, which got the backing of the Bancroft family after months of public wrangling, Mr Murdoch said he did not "have anything in sight" in terms of acquisitions, and News Corp was likely to pick up the pace of share buy-backs.

The slower growth of trad-itional television stations - News Corp owns the biggest US stations group - was behind the recent decision to put nine smaller US television stations up for sale.

Recent turmoil in the credit markets could mean a $100m-$200m drop in the likely offer price for the stations, Mr Murdoch said. Analysts had estimated that the stations could be sold for at least $1.2bn.