Rupert Murdoch’s choices to oversee his $5bn investment in Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, its flagship business news title, will no doubt be seen as outsiders by the newsroom into which they are about to walk, but both men have long experience of the US market and of Mr Murdoch.

Les Hinton, the executive chairman of News International and future chief executive of Dow Jones, has become one of Mr Murdoch’s longest-serving lieutenants since starting work at the age of just 15 for the publisher of the Adelaide News, who was then 28 years old.