By Gabriel Snyder

November 18, 2001 | 7:00 p.m

Lachlan Murdoch has a childhood photograph of himself hanging

behind his desk at the News Corporation headquarters on Sixth Avenue. In the photo, he's 8 years old and dressed as a paper boy in a street-urchin cap. He's pretending to hawk a copy of the New York Post. Today, Lachlan Murdoch has a very real and critical role in the future of the Post . At 30 years of age, the eldest son of News Corp. chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch has evolved into the driving force behind the tabloid newspaper, which turns 200 years old on Nov. 16. In recent months, the younger Mr. Murdoch has overseen dramatic changes in the paper's newsroom, is presiding over its conversion to color, and has vigorously sought to turn his 70-year-old father's longtime labor of love and American mouthpiece into a profitable business. All the while, the usually media-shy Mr. Murdoch, who is News Corp.'s deputy chief operating officer and the Post 's chairman, has shown signs of increasing comfort with the spotlight-as well as his growing role in his father's still-widening media empire. It was Lachlan Murdoch's call, for example, to oust the Post 's previous editor, Xana Antunes, last spring and replace her with Col Allan. And last month, the spiky-haired Mr. Murdoch stood up and met the cameras and microphones along with Mr. Allan and publisher Ken Chandler when word broke that one of the Post 's employees had contracted anthrax. "When I'm in New York, which is most of my time, [the Post ] is a third to half of my time," Mr. Murdoch said in an interview at his spacious News Corp. office. He said of the paper: "It's the most fun part of my day. Even though there's a lot of demands on my time, it's rewarding. "It's the Post ," Mr. Murdoch added with emphasis. But clearly, Mr. Murdoch doesn't view the Post as some kind of entertaining diversion. Since Rupert Murdoch bought the paper in 1976 and then repurchased it in 1993, analysts have estimated that it loses between $10 million to $20 million a year. The paper's primary value, it was long held, was to serve as a brash, block-lettered sounding board for Rupert Murdoch's political and business causes. That's supposed to change under Lachlan Murdoch, however. If the Post 's guiding principle was once to keep his father happy, Lachlan Murdoch's chosen mission is to turn the paper into a money-making business. In terms of sheer numbers, he's off to a prodigious start. Citing its filing with the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Post recently announced that for the six-month period ending on Sept. 30, the Post 's daily circulation rose an unprecedented 22 percent. Though some of this rise is due to the paper's slashed 25-cents-per-copy price-as well as to increased readership after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks-Mr. Murdoch and his colleagues also attribute the gain to a repositioning and revitalization of the paper, both editorially and entrepreneurially. "People thought the Post was a great brand and that there was this aura around it and that it could never change," Mr. Murdoch said. His obvious message? Nothing's sacred, and he's going to keep on making changes. He has already made substantial changes, of course. The first indication of Lachlan Murdoch's burgeoning control of the Post came back in April, when Ms. Antunes-who had produced a lively paper largely dependent upon gossip, business and media coverage-was replaced by Col Allan, who had been a News Corp. editor in Sydney, Australia. While Rupert Murdoch was in Detroit trying to negotiate a deal for the acquisition of the DirecTV satellite-television operation from General Motors, Lachlan introduced Mr. Allan to an apprehensive Post newsroom. Since then, Mr. Allan-with Lachlan Murdoch's consent-has aggressively remodeled the paper's newsroom and the product itself. In June, Mr. Allan fired a number of longtime staffers, including two top editors and columnist Jack Newfield. Not long afterward, the Post 's look changed, too, as Mr. Allan reworked the famous front page into a blockish arrangement that often touted multiple stories at once and increased photography in the paper. At the same time, a handful of media outlets -including this column-sharply criticized Mr. Allan for remodeling what some considered to be a prized, fun-to-read tabloid. Unfazed, Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Chandler, the publisher, stayed the course and stood behind Mr. Allan. "What Col brings to it is incredible journalistic instincts, and he is evolving the paper very quickly," Mr. Murdoch said. In Lachlan Murdoch's mind, the Post had long been in need of an overhaul, and had lagged behind News Corp.'s other properties overseas. Indeed, Mr. Allan was only one of a number of Australians and Brits that Mr. Murdoch had brought in from other parts of the News Corp. empire to work on production and the transition to color at the Post . For example, Geoff Booth, who was the general manager of the Herald Sun in Melbourne, came to New York as the Post 's general manager. "We really dropped the ball for a while, because we weren't leveraging our skill sets in the U.K. and Australia," Mr. Murdoch said. And now, with the new circulation report and the 22 percent jump, the Post 's newsroom is feeling a pretty big blast of vindication. The recent terrorism-and-war-driven spike in readership has also helped. Mr. Chandler, who also attributes the gains to the paper's improved reproduction at its new $250 million plant in the South Bronx, said the tabloid is currently selling about 600,000 papers a day. The circulation gains have come at a cost. Mr. Chandler said of the 25-cent price cut, "It's like any other promotion. It's expensive. We could have taken the money we've invested in the 25 cents and we could have spent several hundred million dollars on TV campaigns, and kept the price at 50 cents." But the Post 's biggest challenge-the true goal-is to find more advertisers for the paper. In the advertising market, the Post has long been caught between The New York Times on the high end and the Daily News for the mass market. Most of the Post 's readers, the theory goes, also read one of the other dailies. So while the Post has some high-end readers, advertisers figure they can reach them by buying an ad in The Times . Likewise, the Daily News already offers more reach to a middle-class and minority audience. The trick for Lachlan Murdoch and the Post , then, is to raise circulation high enough so that advertisers can't ignore the tabloid anymore. Daily News officials, naturally, are skeptical that the Post can make inroads on advertising until the tabloid has a sizable readership of its own. "The reason we're so important is that over half our audience reads no other newspaper," said News president Les Goodstein. "They don't bring a lot to the party in terms of mass or exclusive readership." But this is where Lachlan Murdoch believes color will be his ally. Mr. Murdoch is banking that the end of the black, white and red era will boost readership-the Post published its first color cover on Nov. 13, the day after the crash of Flight 587-and is trying to lure advertisers with color ads. When all the kinks of printing color have been worked out on all four presses in the plant-a process which Mr. Chandler estimated would take until at least early 2002-the Post will be able to print color on 64 pages per issue. At the same time, Mr. Murdoch clearly has his sights set on the Daily News . There's a piece of conventional wisdom that says New York can't support two profitable tabloids along with The New York Times . And this axiom has always-no matter how much the two tabloids diverge editorially-set the Daily News , which makes money in a good year, against the Post . Lachlan Murdoch, relatively new to the clash but very much in charge now, didn't back down a bit. "The Post and the Daily News are in a battle," he said. "It's the last of the great newspaper struggles in America." -Gabriel Snyder Wall Street Journal staffers might not know when they'll be returning to their offices at the World Financial Center, which they evacuated on Sept. 11, but they might start getting their stuff back … soon. In a tongue-in-cheek memo sent last week, WSJ assistant managing editor Cathy Panagoulias wrote that workers had begun the process of taking everything on and in people's desks, cleaning the items and bagging them. More urgent items, she wrote, could come back to their owners first. But those yearning for their Filofaxes, business cards and new pairs of New Balance running shoes are out of luck. "These things," Ms. Panagoulias wrote, "can wait." Among the items that could make the cut? Eyeglasses "purchased at the extremely expensive eye doctor in the lobby," divorce papers and "notes for a leder that has been in the works for a year and that you are actually going to write." In addition, she wrote, "Because each piece of paper has to be vacuumed (yes, really!), we want to know if there are file cabinets of old stuff that you can just abandon. Those of you who have many file cabinets, please consider this request seriously." Vacuumed? "We're doing asbestos abatement," Dow Jones vice president Steven Goldstein explained. "This is part of it." -Sridhar Pappu Two weeks after Time magazine boasted that it got an exclusive "first look" at Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (produced by AOL Time Warner corporate subsidiary Warner Bros.), the Nov. 19 issue revealed what the magazine's movie critic, Richard Corliss, thought of the film. And woo- wee! Let's just say that you're unlikely to see a quote from Mr. Corliss in the trailer. The veteran critic dubbed H.P. a "movie by the numbers" and "often stodgy, humorless." The worst slight of all was calling H.P. a "magic act performed by a Muggle." For the uninitiated, "Muggle" is Potter-speak for a non-wizard. Mr. Corliss' review was a dour detour from Time 's previous H.P. gushfest, in which writer Jess Cagle piled on the superlatives like "eye-popping grandeur," "dazzling special effects" and "sumptuous production values." So how did Mr. Corliss feel about raining on the Potter parade? Not too bad. He didn't think he gave the movie a total pan, calling his review "mixed-mixed-mixed-mixed-negative." And Mr. Corliss said it was a lot easier to review H.P. than it was reviewing Batman in 1989-the first big Warner Bros. movie after the Time Inc.–Warner merger. That time, Mr. Corliss was assigned to write both Time 's cover story on the movie as well as the review. That was hard. "I didn't think it fair to have a quote from Tim Burton saying, 'This is the most wonderful movie I've ever worked on,' followed by a quote from me which said, 'No, it's not.'" -G.S.